


La Belle et la Bête

by Eienvine



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, but not really an AU, though it does diverge from canon after Avengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-01-20 14:42:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18527149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eienvine/pseuds/Eienvine
Summary: This is a story about a beautiful girl forced to live with a hideous beast, until love sets them both free.





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I have always been fascinated by the Beauty and the Beast story, partly because there are so many different possible readings of it; for instance, now we tend of think of it as a straight-up romance, but the French versions are often interpreted as preparing young ladies for arranged marriages. I also like it because, as with so much of folklore, this type of fairy tale (type 425, Search for the Lost Husband, if you're into the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system) is astonishingly widespread, with there being a multitude of examples from all over the world and spanning many years of history. And I liked the idea of these motifs being common not just across Earth, but across all Nine Realms, and I liked the idea of a Sif/Loki story being yet another example of the fairy tale. This is not an AU, however; this is compliant with the first Thor and Avengers movies.
> 
> A heads-up: if you're familiar with the original French tale, you'll know that the at the end, the Beast nearly dies, not at the hand of an angry mob, but because he loses the will to live. So, trigger warning for Loki being sort of passively suicidal at the end.

. . . . . .

This is a story about a beautiful girl forced to live with a hideous beast, until love sets them both free.

Maybe you’ve heard such a tale before; they’re common across all realms. But for the Lady Sif, goddess of war, shieldmaiden to Odin Allfather, the fairy tale becomes reality in the moment she steps through an iron gate in a crumbling stone wall.

(In a manner of speaking, anyway; it could be argued that everything began when she landed on this desolate moon, or when she requested a leave of absence to travel the realms solo for a time in an attempt to center herself, or when two Jotuns breached the vault on Thor’s coronation day and Sif’s well-ordered life fell to pieces around her ears, or when the wiley old Allfather picked up a tiny Jotun baby in a ruined temple and saw a resource he could make use of—

So maybe it would be more accurate to say the moment she steps through the gate is the point of no return.)

The point is, Sif steps through the gate.

And immediately finds herself trapped, as these tales often go. The stone-strong barrier that springs up behind her is invisible but sends a buzz across her skin when she gets close: clearly it’s magic. An ancient enchantment, she assumes, left here ages ago, for she knows this moon to be uninhabited, and the crumbling manor house she was about to explore appears to have been abandoned centuries before. An increasingly agitated examination of the stone wall that circles the expansive grounds confirms that the magical barrier encloses the house entirely; there is no way out.

She is trapped.

So, you say, we have a beauty trapped in an enchanted house; there must be a beast. And Sif is about to meet him.

For when she returns to the spot she started, the sun has started to set, and in the dimming light she sees a light in an upper window, one that wasn’t there before: this moon is not so uninhabited after all. She weighs her options for several moments before crossing to the house and knocking firmly on the front door; War has never had much use for timidity.

She knocks; no answer. She knocks again.

And finally she hears footsteps; the door creaks open and a gravelly voice asks, “Is someone there?” Under the layers of rust, there’s something about the voice she almost thinks she recognizes.

The way the light falls means she cannot see the man’s face, but she can see his hands: blue. Ridged.

Jotun.

She shifts subtly, ready for a fight.

And then the voice speaks again, in tones of absolute disbelief: “Sif?”

Surprise loosens Sif’s stance, and the figure steps out into the dusky light. He is small for a frost giant, with long black hair pulled back in a tidy ponytail and plain but neat clothing. And not even the red of Jotun eyes or the blue of Jotun skin can disguise a face she once knew as well as her own, back before things went so wrong.

And now it’s her turn to speak in disbelief: “Loki?”

He stares a long while, wordless and wide-eyed, then looks around as though to ascertain she is alone, then steps back. “I suppose you’d better come in.”

She does, despite all the reasons she knows she should not: again, War and timidity and all that.

The door shuts behind her. And the story truly begins.

. . . . . .

Some explanations before we go on.

Let us go five years into the past and a hundred thousand miles away, to the Realm Eternal. It has been three years since Loki Odinson, god of mischief and adopted younger son of the Allfather, turned his back on his family and people, and two years since he allied with the Chitauri in an attempt to conquer Midgard. He has spent those two years in the dungeons beneath Gladsheim, and his queenly mother has begun to despair for her imprisoned son.

For she had never wanted to punish Loki for what he did; her hope was that this imprisonment would give him time to think, to ponder, to come back to himself, to be rehabilitated and once again become her loving, clever son. But the longer Loki is in that dungeon, the less likely such an outcome seems, for despite all her visits and and expressions of love he grows increasingly resentful there—not to mention, dangerously pale and thin, trapped as he is in a tiny cell far underground.

Odin Allfather shares her concern, but not her conviction that something must be done. He does truly love his adopted son—little though that son would believe it—but as the king of a warlike race, he values justice, stability, and the rule of law above all, and he cannot simply forgive Loki his crimes.

So it takes great persuasion on the queen’s side to convince the king of her plan, but he does come around; as I said, he does truly love Loki. And when he has agreed, Frigga proposes the idea to their son:

House arrest, instead of imprisonment, on a distant empty moon. There is a manor, many years abandoned, that came to the royal family through Frigga’s mother, that can be made livable again though Frigga’s magic. Should Loki serve out his imprisonment there, he will have access to all the house, with its comforts, and to the expansive grounds, where he can walk in the sunlight and regain the health he has lost.

Of course there are conditions: when Loki agrees to the plan (desperate to get out of the dungeon), Frigga and Eir, Asgard’s two greatest sorceresses, place a powerful spell over the house and its grounds. Once he arrives, Loki cannot leave, and he is stripped of all his magic. He cannot even maintain the enchantment that makes him appear Aesir, and though it shames him to catch a glimpse of his reflection and see a monster of the ice looking back at him, he is entirely alone in his exile, so it matters little how he appears.

He refuses Frigga’s offers to send servants along, so she adds an enchantment that will keep house and provide him with food and anything else he needs. His only contact with the outside world comes every three months, when she visits him with the turning of each new season.

And so Loki Odinson and Laufeyson, wearing his true face for the first time in centuries, becomes our beast in his enchanted castle.

. . . . . .

In a state of shock, Loki leads Sif through corridors that are in far better shape than the outside of the house would indicate, to a comfortable sitting room. “Please sit,” he says politely, because even a year of villainy and seven years of imprisonment haven’t made him into a complete savage.

She eyes him suspiciously, but she sits. And Loki brings all his considerable powers of deception to bear in order to keep his expression calm.

Sif. Sif the shieldmaiden, the goddess of war, is here in his prison—the first person he’s seen, besides his mother, in five years. Beautiful, fierce, righteous, loyal Sif is here, and he a Jotun, unable to hide his true form. She is seeing him for the monster he is, the monster he has always been, and it is all he can do to keep from recoiling from her clear gaze.

And yet, she is here. _She_ is _here_. A riot of joy and self-loathing writhe in his chest, both strong enough to make his hands shake. So he clasps his hands in his lap, desperate for her not to see.

(It is not usually a part of the story that the beast has loved the beauty since they were children. But Loki is the exception to this, as he is the exception to many things.)

“How goes your exile?” she asks, and from the way she’s looking around herself, he senses that it’s curiosity, more than concern for his welfare, that prompts her to ask.

It has been years since carelessness and cruelty were his way of life, but he slips easily back into it like he’s slipping into a coat. “The accommodations leave something to be desired,” he drawls, “but I can’t fault the company. I have always thought that the only way to be sure you aren’t surrounded by idiots is to be alone.”

Sif’s eyes are chips of ice. “I see you haven’t changed,” she says sharply, and he feels a surge of triumph, even as he wonders why he’s keeping up this icy wall.

No, he knows why. It is because he is barely keeping his composure now; should he allow his prickly defenses to relax, he will never get them back up again, and she will know how weak he is, what a mess, what a disaster— All he wants (is for her stay forever) is to get through this conversation in one piece so that she can get off this moon and leave him to his solitude.

“Nor have you,” he says with a pointed look at her armor and the swords at her side and the bow and quiver slung across her back. “Still Thor’s loyal guard dog?”

“Some of us believe in duty. As you once did.”

“Did I really believe in duty?” he asks airily. “Do recall, my lady, I am the god of lies.”

“We trusted you,” she growls. “Your brother trusted you. I trusted you.”

It takes all that is within him to shrug nonchalantly at that; a declaration of trust from Sif is rare, and he wonders how things might have been different if she’d ever told him this before things went wrong. “Then you are both fools. Although, of course, I have always known that Thor is a fool.” Now that the name has been spoken, it’s on the tip of his tongue to ask after Thor, but he reels it back. The crown prince came to visit him occasionally in the dungeons of Asgard, but Loki was not receptive or kind, leading to a terrible fight a month before Loki was moved to this moon. He thought at first that Thor might come to visit him, but—

Not that it matters.

“Enough of this,” snaps Sif. “Clearly attempting polite conversation was a waste of my time. How do I leave?”

It is genuine confusion that furrows Loki’s brow. “The same way you came, I suppose.”

“I cannot. There is a barrier across the gate, as surely you know.”

“You walked through the gate?”

“How else would I get here?”

“I assumed my mother, or Heimdall . . .” He trails off and looks at her, a strange hollowness stealing through his chest. “Why are you here?”

“I came to this moon to hunt,” she explains tersely, “and I saw this old house and thought it might make a good place to bed down for the night.” Her lips tighten into a thin line. “I’d no idea of this being your prison. If I had known, I can assure you I would not have come to interrupt your solitude.”

Loki’s chest is an empty cavern. It makes no sense for her words to hurt so much; he didn’t want her to come here, to see him in a monster’s skin, and all he wants out of this conversation is for her to leave. And yet the knowledge that she did not agree to come here on Frigga’s behalf, as he’d assumed—the knowledge that she would not choose to see him, given the choice . . . Loki forces himself to breathe evenly.

And then a new wave of dread crashes against the shores of his mind. “You simply wandered in?”

She nods.

“And now you can’t wander out?”

Another nod.

He leans back in his chair, his thoughts spinning. “The enchantment Frigga placed on the house,” he realizes. “Those who enter cannot leave, except for her, as the spellcaster. She didn’t specify the enchantment was only to affect me. Why bother, when no one else was ever expected to come here?”

Sif surges to her feet. “You mean I’m trapped here?” she demands.

“For the moment—” he begins, and she runs from the room.

With a sigh he follows her out to the front walk and watches in some amusement as she runs along the wall, trying every gate, every gap where the stone has fallen; then she climbs the wall in several places, attempting to vault over the top. The result is always the same.

“How do I leave?” she demands, panting hard, when she has given up.

Loki shrugs. “Call for your brother, perhaps. If he is listening, he can—”

“Heimdall!” Sif yells immediately, looking up at the sky. Nothing happens, and she shouts again, and again, and again . . .

The more she shouts with no answer, the more his traitorous heart lifts at the thought that Sif could be forced to stay here. “Perhaps he is busy.”

“Perhaps he will get an earful from me when he finally answers,” she growls.

“Surely you will be missed when you don’t report for your duties—”

“I am taking a leave of absence,” she says. “I’m not expected back for months.”

Curious. “Well, if you don’t hear from him, the queen visits every three months. She can take you home then.”

“And how soon will she come again?”

A smirk graces his lips. “Two and a half months.”

Sif growls in anger. “There must be another way.”

Another shrug. “I have no magic here, and no way to contact anyone. Always if I have needed to communicate with Asgard, I have waited for my mother or called for Heimdall.”

Sif stares at him a long time, and then she tips her head back. “Heimdall!”

It’s going to be a long night.

. . . . . .

Heimdall does not answer that night, so Sif spends the night in one of the manor’s many guest chambers. She says little to Loki that night, other than when she steps into the guest chamber and the candles flare to life and the bedclothes fold themselves down, ready for her to sleep in them. “I thought you were stripped of magic in your exile,” she says accusingly.

“One of the queen’s enchantments,” he says. “Clearly one clever enough to accommodate extra guests.”

She looks at him a long moment, and then steps into the room and closes the door, little caring if she’s being rude. Loki may have been her prince once, but he is now a traitor, a prisoner, an outcast. He betrayed them all. He betrayed her, and it still hurts, and she has never been quick to forgive.

Things often look better in the morning. This is not one of those times. She is still trapped with Loki, and Heimdall is still not answering, and after shouting fruitlessly at the skies for a while, she stalks out onto the grounds.

First she circles the grounds one more time, checking the wall and the barrier, to no effect. Then she sets off on a search. Behind the great house, near what must have once been the kitchen garden, she finds a shed, and inside the shed she finds a shovel. Her mouth set in a grimly determined line, she sets out to dig a hole.

Even with her immense strength, the digging is slow going, but soon enough she is ready to turn her hole to the side, and start trying to dig her way under the wall. She aims a strong strike at the dirt—and the shovel bounces away. With a scowl, she reaches down into the hole, and feels the tell-tale hum of magic. The barrier extends down as well.

Still, she is not ready to give up hope just yet, and she digs for the rest of the day. Hope springs eternal, as they say, but by the time the sun is setting in the sky, it is clear that no amount of hope is going to help her find a way under this wall.

And, she reflects with some dismay as she stands back to look at the hole she’s dug, she’s ruined this bit of the lawn.

As she storms inside, she passes Loki; his body language and expression are polite, but she imagines she sees amusement in his eyes. “I had thought to go eat dinner now,” he says evenly. “Would you like to join me?”

She’s not seen him all day, and she’s been rather glad of it. “I thank you, no,” she says, her voice just this side of civil.

Instead she returns to her room, yells a few more times at an unhearing Heimdall, and prepares to sleep.

The next day passes, and then another, and then another. Still she is trapped in this prison with Loki; nothing has changed, and nothing will change until Frigga returns in two and a half months.

After two weeks, Sif gives in and agrees to eat dinner with Loki. She has spent these last two weeks practicing with her weapons out on the extensive grounds, but the practice dummies she sets up are not worthy opponents, and she grows tired of fighting them. She cannot even hunt, for no forests or animals are to be found inside the manor wall. There is no danger, no adventure, no risk to be had, and she has grown unbearably bored. That is the only reason she agrees to have dinner with the fallen prince.

(It is certainly not because he has stood in the entryway every afternoon for two weeks and invited her to dine with him, his manner more earnest with each passing day, and some long-dormant part of her has begun to pity him.)

Her positive response catches him off guard, she can see in his eyes, but he quickly recovers and smoothly leads the way into the dining room. It is the first time she has eaten here; normally she eats in her room. But the spell on the manor is clever, and there is a place set for her when she enters the room.

“How was your day?” Loki asks as food materializes on their plates, and she shoots him a skeptical look; it has been many years since she and the younger prince were close enough to make polite conversation over dinner. This place has made him desperate.

But perhaps it hasn’t changed him entirely, for when Sif does not answer, his mouth flattens into a thin line. “I see why you chose a life of punching things, not giving public orations,” he mutters.

“Do I offend, my prince?” she responds, all false sweetness, and rises from her chair. “I can dine in my room, if you prefer.”

His answering “No!” is quick enough to destroy every attempt he has made at appearing unaffected by her being there. She flashes a knowing smirk at him as she sits back down, and he deflates.

They finish their meal in silence, and it is only when they are standing to leave that Sif decides that there is strength in mercy and kindness, and wisdom in making one's living situation bearable. So relaxes unbends enough to say, “My day was fine, thank you for asking. And yours?”

“Fine as well,” he says after a moment, his eyes wide with surprise.

And she leaves the room, smirking with amusement at the flabbergasted look on his face.

. . . . . .

Of course, for the story to continue, the beautiful maiden must eventually start to get past her distrust and dislike of her beastly companion. And it starts when she asks one day at dinner, “So what is it that you do with your time here?”

Loki looks up at her in surprise. They have eaten dinner together for eight days now, and on each of those days, she has spoken to him only to ask after his day and then lapsed into a silence he is not brave enough to break, knowing the goddess of war's stubborn and implacable nature.

A glance at her face tells him that she is earnest in her question; she must truly be bored. His first instinct is to respond mockingly—old habits die hard, and he has learned well over the years that sincerity just gives your opponents ammunition to use against you later. But that instinct is overpowered by the joyful feeling that Sif, glorious Sif, is actually initiating a conversation with him.

So he makes his answer light and conversational. “Mostly I read.”

“There were books left here, when the place was abandoned?”

He shakes his head. “Part of the queen's spell. It produces copies of books from the Gladsheim royal library, when I ask. It cannot copy those protected by spells, but those are mostly books on magic, which would do me no good here anyway.”

The Lady Sif must truly be in a talkative mood. “So you read. Novels?” she guesses. “Romances? Poetry?”

He has indeed read some of all of these in his boredom, but he certainly not going to tell her that, smirking about the subject as she is. So he answers, “A little of everything. At the moment I'm reading a history of Nornheim.”

She makes a face that is so familiar to him from their childhood—she always has had a very low opinion of reading books, especially ones not about war—that a dull ache blooms in his chest. He ignores it. He's always been very good at ignoring that feeling, and his old friend's recent arrival in his captivity has given him a good chance to get back in practice.

“Is that all you've done?” she asks. “For five years? I hope that at least you have gone outside now and then. For I believe the hope you would regain your strength and health was a major part of your mother's motivation in sending you here.”

Loki bites down the instinctive “She's not my mother” that rises to his lips. That was his reaction for so long that it's hard to fight it back now, but the fact is that it’s been eight years since he discovered he was not Frigga and Odin's son by blood, and those years have bled much of the rancor and anger from him. In fact, some days he rather regrets the way he—

Well, it doesn't matter now. What's done is done.

So instead he says, “Yes, I have been spending time out of doors as well.” Not since she arrived and began spending _her_ days out of doors, as he's fairly certain she would not like the company, but he doesn't say that.

“Is that all?”

He hesitates, embarrassed for a moment, then admits, “I've been teaching myself to play the nyckelharpa. There's a well-stocked music room here.” And then he waits for her to laugh, his ears ringing with the memory of centuries of mocking from the rest of the palace: Loki the lesser prince, studying magic instead of war, like a weak and useless woman. And now he is wasting his time on the nyckelharpa, equally weak and useless and womanly.

And Sif does look surprised, but there's a smile behind it. “I should like to hear you play someday,” she says. “I have always been rather fond of the nyckelharpa.”

Her response is so completely opposite of what he'd expected that for a moment he can't find words to respond. “Any time you like,” he manages finally. And then, unwilling to let the first proper conversation they've had in ages die so quickly, he asks, “And how do you spend your days here?”

(As though he doesn't know; as though he's not painfully aware of where she is at every moment of every day.)

“Training on the grounds,” she answers. “Running, archery, sword drills.”

“I hope you're finding it . . . useful,” he says.

She shrugs. “I do worry I'm getting rusty. The practice dummies I set up don't put up much of a fight.”

And this conversation has gone so smoothly, so free of rancor for the first time in years, that Loki barely thinks before responding. “Should you ever like a sparring partner that can fight back,” he drawls, “I could probably find room in my schedule for you.” And then he freezes. What in the Nine Realms was he thinking? She's never going to allow the traitor prince, the former friend who once sent the Destroyer after her, to face her with a sword.

Sif looks appraisingly at him for a long time, and he's never felt so ugly, so very aware of his blue skin and red eyes and ridged face. He doesn't think about his appearance much anymore, since he only looks at his reflection when he happens to catch it in a window; in his first month at the manor, he hid or destroyed all the mirrors, over and over until the spell finally caught on and stopped reproducing them. But sitting here in front of the most beautiful girl he's ever known, the woman he had once hoped to—well, it's hard not to be horribly, horribly aware that he is a beast.

He's about to rescind the offer, claiming it was all a joke, when she gives the tiniest of nods. “All right, then, I'll see you in the training yard tomorrow.”

And something in his chest thaws.

. . . . . .

If you were to confront Sif that night and ask her why she agreed to sparring with Loki, she wouldn’t be able answer, beyond a weak-sounding “I was bored”; she’d been just as surprised as him to find herself answering in the affirmative.

(If you should ask her years later why she agreed to it, she would confess that even then, before she consciously admitted it to herself, there was a part of her that wished to have her old friend Loki back, and wondered whether this punishment would succeed in rehabilitating him, and thought that agreeing to spend more time with him might help achieve that goal.)

Still, she is half-anxious when he shows up on the sparring grounds the following morning, half-fearful that he will use this as a chance to do her harm. A ridiculous idea, of course, because if he meant her harm, they’ve been sleeping in the same house for three weeks and he’s had nothing but chances to hurt her, should he feel so inclined.

And she’s fairly certain, from the way he looks at her sometimes when he thinks she doesn’t notice, that he does not feel so inclined. In fact, she suspects his feelings for her are the exact opposite of wishing her harm. Hardly a surprise, given that she is the only woman other than his mother that he has seen in five years, and given that she has long suspected that he had feelings for her when they were young.

We have explored all of these musings so that you know her state of mind in the moment that Loki leaves the manor and walks to the training yard. He has found leather armor somewhere, and is wearing gloves; this surprises her at first—Loki never favored gloves when they were younger—until it occurs to her that if their skin should accidentally brush while they spar, it could do her harm, given his Jotun form.

Quite thoughtful of him, really.

Silently she tosses him a wooden sword; she learned on her second day at the manor that the spell will produce certain objects she asks for, and it seems the spell has decided that dull practice weapons count. (It will not create proper weapons, and it had alarmed her, just a little, to wonder what Frigga was worried about when she set up her spell so it could not arm Loki with dangerous weapons.)

He catches it and gives her a smirking, dramatic little bow, and it’s such a good impression of Fandral that she has to bite back a grin. She raises her sword and gives an experimental swing, unsure of Loki’s skill level; who knows how much he’s fallen out of practice while he’s been imprisoned here, and even before his betrayal, it had been years since he had spent much time practicing with her and Thor and the Three.

So she is surprised when he parries very ably and turns the movement into a swing toward her midsection, one she has to jump out of the way to avoid. She raises her eyebrows and looks up at Loki.

He looks a bit surprised, a bit sheepish, and mostly pleased with himself.

She stares. And then she grins. And then she leaps into the fight with gusto.

She’s better than him, always has been, but he acquits himself admirably, and she wonders if he was this good in Asgard and she simply did not notice because he so rarely came to spar with them, or if he has only grown this good after five years of practice here on this forsaken moon.

Still, she does eventually get the upper hand, and that’s when her confidence gets the better of her; she grows careless, just for a moment, and Loki sees an opening and disarms her. His mistake is letting his surprise at his success make _him_ careless, for in that moment of surprised stillness, she tackles him to the ground and flings his sword away.

They grapple together hand to hand for a time until Sif manages to throw him down and leap atop him. And in the thrill of victory, she forgets who she’s sparring with—forgets what that blue skin means—and, meaning to pin him down until he yields, brings her bare forearm down against Loki’s bare throat.

Instantly she is hissing in pain and scrambling off him, and Loki is clambering to his feet with distress written across his face. “How badly are you hurt?” he demands.

Sif twists her arm so she can get a good look at it; there’s a white patch across her forearm, but she hopes that given how briefly they made contact, the frostbite won’t go too deep. “Not too badly,” she says, but Loki is having none of it.

He hurries her into the house and calls out, “Warm water!” A basin obediently appears on a table in the entryway, filled with water. Without hesitation, he grabs Sif’s arm with his gloved hand and plunges it into the basin.

Her whole arm stings and aches, but the flesh is warming up again, which is good. Loki disappears down a hallway and returns in a few minutes with towels, bandages and a small jar. With quiet efficiency he dries off her arm, spreads a salve from the jar onto it (his gloves will be ruined, but it doesn't seem to occur to him that she could apply the salve herself), then wraps it with bandages. But all the while he will not make eye contact, and when she finally catches sight of his expression once he has finished and stepped back, she sees shame and embarrassment splashed across his face.

“I did not intend to hurt you,” he says tightly, still not looking at her. “Clearly us sparring is a bad idea.”

And suddenly Sif understands something she should have understood weeks ago: this is not the Loki she knew, neither the clever, mischievous boy of their childhood nor the angry, resentful traitor of five years ago. Oh, parts of him are still there; the intelligence and the sarcasm and the wall he carefully constructs to hide his true feelings. But this Loki has been beaten down by years of imprisonment and loneliness, by the pain he still carries from that unexpected revelation about his past. This Loki doubts himself openly, something the old Loki only ever did in secret. She’s surprised by how much that bothers her, and how much she suddenly misses the Loki she met when she first came to Gladsheim all those centuries ago.

Which is, perhaps, why she responds the way she does. Perhaps she misses her old friend, and pities what he has become. Or perhaps she just knows that this is what Frigga would have her do, and Thor as well, if they were here. Perhaps a bit of both. “Clearly us sparring will require me to be a little more careful,” she corrects him. “It will have to wait, though, until this arm heals; until then, perhaps you will join me in archery practice?”

He stares.

“I hope you don’t intend to leave me without a sparring partner again,” she says.

He stares longer still. And then he nods slowly. “Archery sounds fine.”

. . . . . .

And from that moment on, things begin to change.

. . . . . .


	2. The Middle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The nyckelharpa is a type of rather lovely old Scandinavian fiddle in which you change pitch by pressing keys that press the strings, rather than fretting the strings with your fingers. (Do you call it fretting on a violin? I don't know, I play mandolin.) To imagine the scenes where Loki is playing the sad song on his nyckelharpa, I listened a lot to Två Konungabarn by Myrkur: https://youtu.be/CgtcG_8E7Zg for the full tune, https://youtu.be/e7sK5OiJHHQ if you want to see her play the nyckelharpa. Check it out; it's a gorgeous instrument and a gorgeous song.

. . . . . .

Weeks pass.

. . . . . .

“No, don’t inhale and hold your breath,” Sif says, and lifts her own bow to demonstrate. “Inhale as you draw, exhale as you zero in on your target, and shoot in that neutral space before you inhale again.”

Loki obediently lifts his bow, breathes, and releases. The arrow hits closer to the center this time, and he blinks in surprise. “That makes a difference.”

“No one ever taught you this?” she asks, and a mix of anger and shame flares to life in his chest as he thinks of how entirely he was ignored those last few years before Thor’s coronation, how Thor and Odin and the entire Asgardian military thought him too useless in battle to bother training or sparring with, so he started to avoid the training grounds entirely.

(Or did he start to avoid the training grounds, and that’s why everyone thought him useless in battle? Old memories have grown unreliable as the years pass, and some days he can’t remember whether he’s the victim or the perpetrator in the crime that his life became eight years ago.)

“No,” he says bluntly, not caring how rude his tone is; her eyebrow lifts in challenge, and then he can see the moment she chooses not to take offense at his tone. Instantly he is filled with shame, because if even the hot-headed goddess of war can control her temper, should he not be able do the same?

“I simply assumed you would know archery,” she says levelly, “based on your preference for throwing knives; you had always seemed to prefer ranged weapons.”

Chagrined, he shakes his head. “I never trained much in archery; I thought my knives were enough.”

“Bows have more range.”

“I could extend the range of my throws with magic.”

“Always looking to magic for every answer,” she says with a sideways glance, and he can see from the rueful curve of her lips that she remembers just as well as he does that they have had some variation of this argument a hundred times over the centuries, back before . . . before.

“It usually worked out for me.” Once such a statement would have been filled with arrogance, but now it only sounds wistful.

“Well, now you’re without your magic. So you might as well learn archery.” She gives the bow in his hand a pointed look, so he fits an arrow to it and follows her instructions: inhale, exhale, release.

The arrow buries itself in the center of the target: his first bullseye.

The grin she turns on him might be the first genuine, unguarded smile she’s given him in eight years.

The grin he returns is the same.

. . . . . .

“These books the spell creates for you,” Sif says one evening as they finish their dinner, “do they disappear once you’ve read them?”

Loki looks startled. “No.”

She nods. “Might I borrow one?”

His eyebrows lift practically to his hairline, and she fixes him with a warning look. “I’ll advise you not to say what you are thinking.”

He lifts his hands in a placating gesture. “I think it very good you mean to improve your mind through reading.”

“You ascribe to me a more noble purpose than I actually hold. I have grown very bored in the evenings; there is only so much time I can spend polishing and maintaining my armor and weapons.”

Loki looks amused. “I have amassed a respectable little collection. You are more than welcome to peruse it.”

She nods and they rise from the table as one, but then Loki hesitates, uncertainty furrowing his brow and clouding those unsettling red eyes. “I . . . I often read in the evenings in the sitting room just off the stairs on the second floor. It has very comfortable furniture and there is always a roaring fire.”

The unasked question hangs in the air between them as she examines him from across the table. That feels uncomfortably friendly . . . but then did she not decide to befriend him, for Frigga’s sake, and for Thor’s? Besides, she already spends her days and her dinners with him. What could adding an evening to that hurt?

Besides, she is tired of the four walls of her bedroom. “Then perhaps I will join you there this evening, if you don’t mind.”

The blue face across from her relaxes. It is still strange to her to see Loki’s expressions on a Jotun face . . . but it is growing less strange with every day that passes.

“I don’t mind at all.”

. . . . . .

When Sif’s arm is healed enough to spar again, Loki puts on even more armor and clothing than last time: to his full body armor and gloves he adds a gorget to cover his neck and a leather helmet that obscures much of his face.

Sif shakes her head when she sees him. “It’s not necessary,” she says. “I’ll be more careful.”

“All the same, I’ll keep it on.”

And he’s glad of the cover ten minutes later, when she has pinned him to the ground and is straddling his chest, looking down at him with her eyes and cheeks bright with victory. He’s glad of it because he’s seen enough of his Jotun face to know that when blood rushes to his face, his skin turns a very noticeable dark blue.

Good to know that the Lady Sif still has the power to turn him into a blushing adolescent.

. . . . . .

“I am famished,” Sif exclaims as she falls into her chair, and is pleased when the plate that appears before her is more heavily laden than usual. Even better, the meal includes several small tomatoes. Tomatoes do not grow in Asgard; they must be imported from other Realms, and so are a rare treat. Frigga truly is a wonderful spellcaster.

She downs her tomatoes quickly—why put off a pleasure?—and then reaches across the table to snatch one of the tomatoes off Loki’s plate.

He stares at her.

“You have never liked tomatoes,” she points out reasonably, and then she hesitates. He did not like them when they were young; he would give his to her any time they were served. But it’s been at least a century since they were close enough to share food like that, and she has to admit she barely noticed him at feasts for a few decades leading up to his betrayal. Perhaps things have changed. Perhaps he has acquired a taste for them, and she never noticed, and now he is angry at her presumptuousness.

It’s hard to say, for she cannot read the look on his face.

Until he speaks. “You remembered,” he says, and the undertone of disbelief in his voice that she should remember such a thing sends a wave of shame through her.

They were such good friends once. But they drifted apart long before he ever learned the truth of his birth, and she knows that was mostly his fault—his resentment for his father and brother slowly poisoning his mind—but she's not entirely innocent there. She had seen the younger prince losing favor in court as Thor grew more popular, and she had known that to be close to him would do her no favors. And as a female warrior, she already had to fight tooth and nail for every shred of respect she got. So when she saw Loki begin to withdraw . . . she let him.

These are thoughts she cannot and will not entertain. “I hope it is still true,” she says, forcing levity into her tone, “or I will feel a little guilty for stealing your food.”

Loki examines her a long time. And then he reaches over deliberately and swipes a mushroom from her plate, his eyes never leaving hers.

She’s always hated mushrooms, and would trade them to Loki in exchange for his tomatoes.

She’s surprised at how pleased she is to know that he remembers.

. . . . . .

“I would hear you play the nyckelharpa.”

Loki stares. Eight evenings now, Sif has whiled away the dark hours after dinner in the sitting room with him, attempting to amuse herself with books that, it’s perfectly clear, barely keep her attention. But she has said little, and it feels like one last barrier they have never overcome: they spar together, they eat together, but none of that has felt like socializing.

So to jump from barely speaking to requesting to hear him play is startling. Because it feels a very personal, intimate thing, to let another person (to let Sif) hear his music. He had no musical abilities or inclination until he came to this forsaken moon, and so has never performed for another person. He has not even performed for Frigga, nor told her about his new hobby, when she has come to visit. And he has no idea if he’s any good; he rather suspects he is, for he has mastered some of the more difficult songs he’s found notation for, and it always sounds the way he knows a nyckelharpa should sound, but without feedback from an audience, he has always secretly feared he is playing the instrument entirely wrong. There are some things it is difficult to learn from a book.

“Would you?” he says stupidly.

“If you don’t mind. I have no musical ability myself, but I do enjoy it.”

He does mind, in fact, for his pride rebels against the possibility that she will think him a poor player. And yet the look in her eyes pierces to his heart. He cannot remember the last time she looked at him as though she believed something he could do would bring her pleasure, rather than pain or disappointment (or, in the last month, merely a reprieve from boredom).

So he finds himself, nearly against his will, going to the music room to fetch his nyckelharpa, his fingers going through the now-familiar routine of tuning the many strings as he returns.

“What shall I play?” he asks awkwardly as he adjusts the strap around his shoulder.

“Anything you like,” says Sif. “The song you love best to play.”

That’s easy enough, and he lifts the bow to the strings and starts to play. It’s an old song he found in a book, old enough that he’s never heard of the composer, old enough that he can make little sense of the title. But it has always spoken to him, ever since he first played it.

Because it sounds like shadows in a forest, like mist on a moonlit lake, like the dark places where lost things hide; it is keening and forlorn and searching. It is the gaping hole in his chest where Loki Odinson used to be, given musical form, and to play it is to immerse himself in melancholy and yet emerge with a lighter heart than he had before.

He is so lost in the song that he is almost surprised when it ends and he is once again in the sitting room, Sif giving him a searching look.

“That is the song you love best to play?”

He nods, suddenly remembering to be apprehensive that she will think poorly of his playing.

“It is beautiful, and wonderfully performed,” she says, and he musters all his defenses to keep from showing his pleasure at her statement. “But Loki, it was so sad. That is what you love best?”

He feels a cruel smirk rise to his mouth, but by the time it arrives it has softened into something bittersweet. “You expected something different?” he asks, and gestures with the hand still holding the bow, indicating . . . everything around them, really. His enchanted prison. His isolation. His Jotun appearance.

She seems to understand, for she returns his sad half-smile.

. . . . . .

“Will you do something for me?” Sif asks two nights later at dinner.

Loki blinks in surprise, and the suspicious, haughty way he drawls “That really depends on what it is, doesn’t it?” is so like the old Loki that it nearly makes her smile.

She places a book next to his plate, open to a certain page. “Learn a song for me.”

Loki glances down and a frown darkens his face. She’d thought that might be his response to this book of Asgardian folk tunes she requested from the house's enchantment; she’s noticed he seems to avoid anything that reminds him of Asgard.

But she misses the things that remind her of home, and also she thinks—she hopes—that making Loki remember Asgard could be good for him. It could remind him of what he is giving up by stubbornly refusing to accept Frigga’s offer of redemption and forgiveness.

“No,” he says flatly.

“Please,” she says. “It is my favorite. It reminds me of home.”

His expression turns calculating. “A trade, then: I will learn it, if you answer one question, fully and honestly.”

That seems easy enough. “Agreed.”

He leans forward, his elbows on the table, his eyes sparking with curiosity—and that too is so very Loki that for a moment she forgets herself and smiles. “You love Asgard,” he says. “More than you love your own life, for you have sworn to die for Asgard, if necessary.”

She nods, unable to hide her sudden frown as she realizes what he’s about to ask.

“Then why did you leave? Why abandon your realm and your people to hunt on distant moons for an undetermined amount of time?”

She has carefully avoided (and sometimes blatantly ignored) any discussion of this topic up to this point. But she did make a deal with him. So she forces herself not to shift uncomfortably, or do anything more than she already has to let him see her reaction to the question. “I love Asgard,” she agrees steadily. “More than my own life. But in the last few years . . . something changed. The golden towers of Gladsheim no longer seemed to shine quite as brightly as they had.”

What she does not tell him—what she will not tell him—is that she has traced this blight on her pure love of Asgard back to him. Oh, it’s nothing sentimental to do with Loki, really. It’s just that, in a moment of harsh honesty with herself, she imagined how she’d have reacted if she were Loki, learning that he’d believed a lie all his life, learning that he was little more than a stolen bargaining chip . . . and knew in her heart she might have reacted badly too. And from there, she was forced to admit to herself that Odin and Frigga had handled Loki’s situation poorly.

And admitting that her beloved king, who she revered like both a father and a god, was all too fallible and capable of making grave errors of judgement was a blow that she has not yet quite recovered from. She lost that certainty of her youth that told her that Asgard was the most perfect place imaginable, that Odin was the wisest and most just being in the universe, and that either of them were worth giving up her life for, if it were required.

This loss of certainty preyed on her mind, on her formerly unshakeable faith in her realm, until she knew that she must get away and take time to recenter herself. Time away from Asgard, out among the barbaric and the uncivilized, would surely restore her absolute loyalty to Asgard. After all, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

But she can tell Loki none of this. “These things happen, I suppose,” she says, “as we get older; the absolute certainty of youth gets harder to hold onto. I knew that if I left Asgard and experienced personally how inferior every other place is to it, I could regain that certainty.”

His expression is hard to read. “Did it work?”

“It . . . is in the process of working.”

He looks at her a long time. “I wish I shared your conviction that the certainty of youth can be regained,” he says.

She has no response to that.

. . . . . .

The weeks fly past. Heimdall still does not answer her call. But she finds herself calling less often the days go by.

. . . . . .

The first time Loki bests Sif in hand-to-hand combat, she grins as triumphantly as if she’d been the victor. “Very well done,” she says as he offers a hand to pull her to her feet.

For once he doesn’t hide the smile on his face as he pulls his helmet off and wipes the sweat from his face. He can tell that his hair is wet with sweat as well, and a bit of a tangled mess.

Sif’s voice interrupts his wiping. “Isn’t it terribly hot and sweaty to spar in this hot weather with that helmet on?”

It is, in fact, terribly hot and sweaty, and it’s even worse in his Jotun form that it would be in his Asgardian form; the enchantment he wore for most of his life granted him some of the biological properties of Asgardians, not just their appearance. Now that he is in his natural form, he finds his tolerance for heat has lowered.

He doesn’t answer, but her expression clearly says that she doesn’t need him to. “You can spar without it,” she says, not for the first time. “I’m more careful now. I won’t get hurt again.”

“I prefer to cover my face,” he says, which is not precisely what he meant to say; he meant to say “I prefer to cover up.” And he fights back a grimace as he realizes she might come to the exact realization that he does not want her to come to: that it still shames him terribly to have the most beautiful woman he’s ever known see him like this.

And unfortunately, he can see from her expression that she has come to precisely that realization. “Again?” he says quickly, pulling the helmet back on, despite the dread he feels at the heat that awaits him.

She looks at him a long time, her expression unreadable, then shakes her head and grabs her sword.

. . . . . .

“These arrows are looking worse for wear,” Sif observes as she gathers them after a bout of archery practice. “I shall have to repair them tonight.”

Loki’s body language and expression don’t change—he is too practiced at hiding his true feelings—but after reacquainting herself with him these past weeks, she can detect the hint of disappointment in his voice as he replies, “Which you will probably find more interesting than reading.”

Is he disappointed that she won’t be joining him in the sitting room again? But then that shouldn’t surprise her, should it? They have spent every evening together for some time now; usually they read, but sometimes they talk (a difficult thing, sometimes, with so much bad blood between them for so long), and every now and then he plays his nyckelharpa for her. So why would it surprise her to learn that he’s grown accustomed to her company? She knows that any friendship between them is long gone, obliterated when he was temporarily on the throne, and she chose Thor’s side, and he sent the Destroyer after her. His behavior to her, and hers to him, the few times they talked in Gladsheim’s dungeons made it perfectly clear to her that there was no love left on either side.

But they’ve come to a sort of truce, here in his enchanted prison; they’re setting aside old grievances, for the sake of not going mad with boredom or killing each other while they’re trapped here. And she is trying to regain some of that old friendship, knowing Frigga would want her to do so. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise her that he’s grown accustomed to her company in the evenings.

So instead of settling down in her room with the arrows, as she’d planned, she gathers all the tools she’ll need and makes her way to the sitting room. Loki looks up as she walks in, and there is no mistaking the flash of pleasure on his face before he wrestles his expression back under control.

He says nothing as she settles down and gets to work, but she notices that he seems to be staring at the same page for ages; perhaps his heart is not in reading tonight. And truth be told, she’d like something to entertain her while she sees to these arrows.

So she says, “Tell me a story.”

He looks up, surprised.

“You were the best storyteller in Gladsheim. Better than all the skalds. Don’t tell Bragi I said that.”

Loki stares, and then the corner of his mouth quirks up, just a little, and then he turns to stare at the fire. “What would you hear, my lady?”

“Sigurd and the dragon,” she says promptly.

“Of course you would choose a heroic battle,” he says, but there’s no true mockery in his tone.

“I am what I am.”

He smirks a little at that, and looks into the fire a moment. “Lo!” he begins, “I will tell you of Sigurd’s travails, with that dread worm, Fafnir the dragon . . .”

Instantly she is transported back to a thousand nights in her youth; she did not know until now how much she has missed the sound of his voice unspooling an ancient tale.

She leans back in her seat and smiles.

. . . . . .

“Well, then, I saw an opening and I stabbed the serpent,” Sif finishes her story. “It sank into the ocean and I sailed back to Asgard.”

Loki turns to look at the fire as he thinks. “Then Lady Sif, her sword unsheathed,” he murmurs,  
“summoned her strength      to swing a mighty blow.   
The serpent was sent      to the sleep of the sword   
and Tyr’s fierce daughter,      feeder of ravens,   
the lady of war      turned her wave-steed   
to sail the swan road      to the Realm Eternal.”

He turns to see Sif looking at him with wide eyes. “How do you do that?” she demands. “Just off the top of your head?”

He shrugs. “Long practice. And lots of reading.”

“You always did have a talent for it,” she says thoughtfully, and he knows she’s thinking, as he is, of a thousand sagas he was pressed to write and recite over the years, celebrating the victories of Thor and Sif and the Three. Of course, in Asgard such a task always fell to the skalds, but when they were all out traveling and Thor wished to boast in a mead hall, or when they craved entertainment around the fire on some lonely night in some dreary wasteland, it was Loki who was pressed into service—adding “temporary skald” to his list of duties in their group.

Which he’d never minded, truly. He was good at it, and it had been good to be appreciated. Besides, there was a pleasure in crafting a tale about Sif, for crafting a new kenning to describe the fierce shieldmaiden was often the closest he could get to her; there was a pleasure in allowing his words to touch her in a way he never could. For that, he would put up with Thor and Fandral bickering over whether his latest creation truly paid homage to their might.

“So is that it? It’s a good ending, if you want to stop there.”

She nods. “I think that’s enough of the story.” And she smiles. “I’ve never had a poem written about my exploits alone. I rather like it. It’s a pity no one else was here to admire your work.”

“It’s a pity no one else was here to admire your bravery,” he repeats, and then kicks himself for being such a sentimental fool about her.

Still, he would do far more than craft a saga of her exploits, if it meant her smiling like that at him.

. . . . . .

Nearly two months now. Sif wonders if anyone wonders where she’s gotten to. She wonders why Heimdall doesn’t check up on his sister. She wonders when she stopped worrying about it.

. . . . . .

He finally plays the song she requested he learn (which doesn’t surprise her, as he always did keep his promises) as well as a few others in the book (which does surprise her, as he was so reluctant about learning the first).

Sif smiles all the way through, for it reminds her of home, and her childhood; and she fights back a frown from time to time, for remembering her childhood is always a bittersweet affair. Her childhood was a beautiful, idyllic time: playing in the golden halls and sprawling gardens of Gladsheim, she and Thor and Loki bathed in the glow of Asgard’s sun, brawling under Frigga and Odin’s watchful, loving gazes. To remember it now is to remember how both Loki and Odin let her down, and to wonder if she’s let other people down the same way, and not realized it.

Loki finishes a lively reel and lowers his bow. “We danced to that once,” he says quietly, his gaze fixed on the fire. “At the harvest festival. Do you remember?”

Sif blinks in surprise. “We danced together many times as children,” she says carefully. She doesn’t remember specific songs they danced to; she doesn’t have a mind for music, and didn’t bother keeping track of which dances she gave to whom. She wonders why Loki remembers.

He looks a little downcast that she does not remember, and she finds herself hastening to add, “I did always prefer dancing with you. You did not step on my toes so often as Thor. And when you did, it did not hurt so much as it did with Thor.”

As she’d hoped, Loki laughs at that. And then, his gaze still determinedly fixed on the fire, he asks, “How is Thor?” It is the first time he has spoken of his former brother in many weeks.

She hesitates. “Not so . . . sunny, as once he was. But healthy. Happy enough.”

“Ah,” says Loki.

“He has been much distracted of late,” she muses. “What with recent events, and his time on Midgard . . .”

“Yes, he did seem to find Midgard distracting,” Loki mutters under his breath.

“You speak, I suppose, of the Midgardian woman?” Sif asks, and waits for her heart to sink, just a little, as it always does when Jane Foster is brought up. It is not unheard of for Asgardians, even the mighty ones, to take lovers from the lesser Realms; what hurts is that Thor is so very taken with his Midgardian. It is clearly not a passing fancy.

And yet the hurt does not come this time, and on some level that doesn’t quite surprise her. Things have been changing between her and Thor for years now. And anyway it’s not as though Thor broke some promise to her, or was even ever aware of her feelings. And anyway both have changed as they grew.

(And truth be told, Sif has come to question her reasons for caring for Thor. He is well-matched to her in battle, but it does not follow that they would be well-matched in marriage. He is handsome, but so are other men, and she has come to see that he has more flaws than she used to let herself see. And the older she gets, the less certain she is that she would enjoy being queen. She is a warrior, not a diplomat. She has wondered, more than once over the last few years, if her lingering feelings for Thor are more habit than true affection.)

Loki looks at her for just a moment too long to pass it off as natural and casual, then says off-handedly, “I was thinking only of the fact that he has traveled there more often than most Asgardians.”

This is strange. Is Loki attempting to spare her feelings by turning the discussion away from Jane Foster? Is Loki, of all people, actually attempting to do her a kindness?

It is heartwarming, but it is also rather embarrassing; the goddess of war does not like being an object of pity. So she says evenly, “He does indeed. And I know that it is in part because of the Midgardian woman. But it does not grieve me. Thor and I will always be friends, and comrades-in-arms. But his romantic affairs . . . I have decided to no longer concern myself with those.”

Loki’s response is silence, and a look she cannot read—disbelief? Shock? It is wide-eyed and staring, with an intensity that makes her a little uncomfortable. But nearly as soon as the expression appears, it is gone, and the Jotun prince is much the same as he ever was. “I see,” he says, and turns his attention to tuning his nyckelharpa.

And Sif turns her attention away from him, and wonders what to make of the unexpected jolt that ran through her body when she met Loki’s intense gaze.

. . . . . .

Loki hardly remembers when he first learned to wear a mask; he’s been doing it so long that he can’t recall quite when or why he started. Something to do with Thor, no doubt, and with the second prince realizing that he will never be anyone’s favorite—something to do with the way that Thor charmed people without even trying, while Loki’s best efforts never managed to inspire that same level of affection. Or perhaps it had to do with the time when everyone—Loki, Thor, their parents, everyone—realized that Loki would never be as skilled a warrior as Thor; his talents lay in magic, usually considered the realm of women and of no use to a warrior or a prince.

The point is, Loki learned centuries ago to hide his feelings behind a placid expression. But somehow he never realized exactly what the repercussions of that might be until the evening that he has made Sif laugh (Sif, the somber goddess of war, laughing heartily and helplessly over his retelling of a sticky situation he once got into with a cabbage merchant, and Loki feels lighter than air) and then she says something unexpected.

“I’m pleased we’ve been getting along so well,” is how she begins. “I know you've hated me for a long time, but I am pleased that we have come to this truce.”

And the floor drops out from under Loki. “I never hated you,” he protests numbly, but Sif just fixes him with a laughing, scolding look.

“Not even when you were so angry with us for questioning you when you were on the throne? When you sent the Destroyer after us? Or when you refused to receive any of us as visitors when you were in the dungeons? And even before all that occurred, you withdrew from us for many years.”

This is what happens when one gets too good at hiding one’s emotions, he supposes. One might convince someone that one hates them when the truth is exactly the opposite. “I was angry with you all,” he confesses. “But I never hated you.” He hesitates. “In fact, I have always wished that you and I were . . .” _Each other’s_. “Better friends.”

Her surprised expression eventually gives way to a sad, rueful smile. “I have wished the same.”

This is all very vulnerable and exposed, and every nerve is Loki’s body is alight, half anticipation and hope, half fear and anxiety. He wants nothing more than to retreat back behind his mask, where it’s safe, where he’s so good at hiding his emotions that he has managed to convince the woman he loves that he hates her. But there is another part of him—a part that he discovered here on this forsaken moon—that whispers that to retreat now could cost him everything.

And against all odds, this second part of him wins out. “But we have become . . . friendly here, have we not, my lady?”

“I rather suppose we have,” she says thoughtfully. “How unfortunate it took us becoming imprisoned together to truly become friends.”

There it is; she said it first: they are friends, and the thought fills Loki’s chest with lightness. “I am glad to hear you consider us friends,” he says evenly, and then some part of his nature that apparently feels the need to destroy his every chance at happiness is compelled to add, “For truly I thought you would never forgive me for what I did. That you still hated me.”

That is a step too far. For while he hopes very much that Sif will rush to assure him of her forgiveness—a far-fetched hope, but when are emotions logical?—instead she looks troubled as she ponders how to respond.

All that she eventually comes up with is, “I never hated you, Loki.” It is not affection, and it is not forgiveness. It is less than he had hoped for.

But it is more than he expected.

. . . . . .

That conversation stays with Sif for some time. She was sincere when she said she considers Loki a friend these days, but still she could not bring herself to say that she forgives him for the things he’s done. Is she a liar if she claims to count him as a friend but still struggles to forgive his betrayal? Or is she being kind in extending a hand of friendship despite still struggling with the things he once did?

And most of these questions will not be answered any time soon. But one question is answered in a rather alarming way: is she sincere when she claims to consider him a friend, or is she pretending for Thor and Frigga’s sake?

And this question is answered when, one day in the training yard, she seeks to spice up their usual sparring by using the real swords that she brought with her.

Loki is perfectly willing to agree. It should have been safer than it turns out to be; they’re both wearing armor, and they’re both careful in their fight. And it’s exhilarating at first—it’s been weeks, maybe months, since she swung her favorite sword at a foe. And Loki seems to be enjoying himself too.

But then it goes wrong. Sif lunges toward him, sword extended. Loki starts to parry. But the sparring ground is uneven, being unattended for so many centuries, and Loki steps in a divot and loses his balance, too late for him to parry, too late for Sif to check her lunge.

The leather armor, so good against blunt blows, gives way easily to the point of her sword—it’s a magical sword, always sharp, and she’s always been grateful for the spell but suddenly she hates it, because Loki is falling to the ground and her sword slides back out of his armor, stained with far too much dark blue.

“Loki!” Her sword cast aside, Sif is kneeling beside him almost before he hits the ground. Her fingers fumble on the fastenings of his leather armor—normally she’s so good under pressure.

“I don’t think it’s bad,” he says, wincing, but the shaking of her heads doesn’t go away until she has pulled the armor away from him and lifted his shirt and seen he speaks the truth: though the location of the wound means it could have been fatal, had it gone deep, it was instead something of a glancing blow, a shallow gash across his torso—a flesh wound, really. And now her hands are shaking for a different reason (relief, rushing through her like a flood) as she rips off a piece of her tunic. She nearly presses it to his stomach before she remembers that she cannot touch him, so she hands it to him instead.

(And stares, for far longer than is polite; she’s only ever seen his hands and face in Jotun blue. She sees now that the ridges on his face extend down his torso: strange, beautiful, full of meaning, no doubt, if only she knew how to interpret them.)

“I’m all right,” Loki says when she keeps staring at his stomach, and the dark blue blood that’s dripping down to the sand.

Her gaze comes up to meet his, and he repeats himself. And finally Sif allows herself to relax; she collapses onto the sand, covers her mouth, and lets slip a sigh of relief.

And that’s when it occurs to her: she knows now her concern for him, her affection for him, is sincere. Her heart, still racing from her fear that she’d done him genuine harm, won’t let her believe anything else.

. . . . . .

He plays the song again one night, the one he first played for her. He knows she it thinks too sad, but he'd rather like to be sad tonight; he has done the math, kept track of the days, and he knows all too well that soon Sif will go away and he will never see her again.

(Occasionally he thinks of speaking to Sif, asking if she would ever come back and visit him, or even write him; occasionally his treacherous heart whispers that she might say yes. They’ve grown so close over recent weeks; they joke over sparring, talk easily over dinner, and spend their evenings happily and comfortably in each other’s presence. They’re better friends now than they have been in centuries—strange, how he had to be stripped of everything before they could become close again—and she seems genuinely to enjoy his company. So perhaps . . . But each time he thinks it, he comes to his senses sooner or later; Sif tolerates him because she has no other option, but surely once she is back in Asgard, she will forget him entirely. And he will not throw his pride away and make himself vulnerable, only to be rejected.)

So. Sad music.

But Sif does not exclaim over how sad it is this time; she simply listens with a thoughtful frown marring her brow. And when he he has dropped his bow and the echoes of the last note have faded from the room, leaving only the crackling of the fire to be heard, she lifts her face to look at him.

“Loki,” she says, “won’t you come home?”

He flinches.

“Loki,” she says again, “it’s possible, you know. All your mother wants is for you to renounce your past ways. She wants her son back.”

But Loki is shaking his head as he sets his instrument and bow on a side table. “It’s not that simple. Anyway, she’s the only one who wants me back in Asgard. The rest are glad that the wicked Jotun is contained.”

“That’s not true,” Sif says. “Odin wants his son back. Thor wants his brother back. I want my friend back.”

How lovely if it were true. “If Odin and Thor cared, why did they never come to visit?”

“Did they have any reason to believe they would be welcome?” she retorts sharply. “Or did you tell Thor that he was dead to you and you had no wish to see him again?”

He did tell Thor precisely that, in that last terrible fight down in the dungeons; clearly Thor told Sif of it. So he cannot lie and claim he did no such thing. “All the more reason to believe he does not wish me to return.”

“He loves you,” Sif insists. “Frigga loves you. Odin loves you.” There is no accompanying “And I love you,” not that he truly expected there to be.

But he can’t deny that her words strike his chest like blows, one after another. Because he loves his formal family as well. It is a truth that he admitted after his first few years of exile—six years (several decades) too late. Because no matter if he loves them, or if they truly love him (doubtful), there are some things you can’t come back from, some sins that can’t be forgiven.

So instead he says, “I have no desire to go back and become Odin’s lapdog, forever at his beck and call,” because that is true as well. If there’s anything he’s learned in five years on this forgotten moon, it’s that he was wrong about many things, but so was Odin. And he has a difficult time trusting that the man who raised him has suddenly seen the error of his ways.

And the last truth he does not say: that there is a part of him that fears leaving this prison. He no longer has a place in this universe. He has turned his back on the people of his birth and the people who adopted him; he has made himself a menace across the Nine Realms; he has burned every bridge. So it’s easier to stay here—here where at least he has a place.

“What about to come back and become a friend and brother again?” Sif asks, but Loki is shaking his head.

“I know how Asgard feels about Jotuns. They would never allow it.” And just thinking of the responses he'd undoubtedly receive makes his hands clench into fists.

“Give them a chance—”

“I am a monster, Sif!” His sudden shout is perhaps a disproportionate response to the conversation, but he has been swallowing these words since she showed up, and longer, and now they are bursting forth from him like water through a dam that has sprung a leak. “I am a beast! And they are right to keep me locked up.”

Sif has climbed to her feet, and he recognizes her stance and her expression from the training yard: she is ready for a fight. “You are no monster, Loki Odinson.”

“Look at me!” he yells, gesturing at his face. “I am _blue_. I am _not right_. And the people of Asgard will never accept that.”

Knowing Sif as well as he does, he fully expects her to match his anger. So the fight goes out of him quite suddenly when instead she says softly, “This is not the face of a monster.”

His brow furrows. “Yes—yes it is.”

She shakes her head. “The Jotuns were our enemies in war, but so were the Vanir, once upon a time, and we do not consider them monsters. Your skin is a different color than mine, but there are many beings in the universe who do not look like me, and that does not make them monsters.” His heart lifts, then falls, then lifts again as she says, “Your face does not make you a monster. What was monstrous was the choices you made, when you attacked Jotunheim and Midgard. But what is wonderful about choices is that you can make new choices in the future.”

He stares at her a long moment, suddenly too tired to fight any longer. “I’ll think about it,” he says. It might even be true.

Sif smiles the tiniest bit, just a turning up at the corners of her mouth. “Please do; I miss my friend.”

_Friend_ , it is always _friend_ with her. And yet, given how impossible even that relationship seemed just three months ago, he finds he can be quite content to be her friend.

Probably.

. . . . . .

It turns out it was good they had that conversation that night, because the next morning, there is a knock on the front door as Sif and Loki prepare for the morning’s archery practice. You have not forgotten Frigga, have you, and that she would come back to visit Loki? She’s always terribly polite about knocking, so that it is Loki’s choice to let her in.

Sif and Loki exchange glances, both of them filled with a hundred competing emotions. Then Loki opens the door.

“Hello, dearest,” Frigga smiles. And then absolute shock covers her face as she looks behind Loki. “Sif? What in the Nine Realms are you doing here?”

. . . . . .


	3. The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know how I said at the beginning of the story that Loki would be somewhat suicidal toward the end of the story? This is where that kicks in, in the part of the fairy tale where the beast loses his will to live, once the beauty is gone. He doesn't actively harm himself, but he does stop eating. If you know that you ought not to read this sort of thing, well, here's your warning.

. . . . . .

So here it is, the inevitable moment when the beautiful girl leaves the clutches of the beast to return to her home. But this . . . somehow this doesn’t feel like rescue.

That’s all Sif can think as she and Frigga and Loki go to a parlor and regale Frigga with the tale of how Sif came to be Loki’s fellow prisoner (a somewhat simplified version, as neither Sif nor Loki volunteers how much time they came to spend together, and the deep discussions they had, and the companionable evenings where Loki played music or told stories while Sif daydreamed by the fire). Frigga is quite shocked and declares on more than one occasion that she can’t understand why Heimdall didn’t hear Sif’s frequent calls. “Something in the house enchantment?” she mutters at one point. “But he can hear Loki . . .”

Sif, who once thought that her half-brother was going to get quite a piece of her mind once she was back on Asgard, finds she is no longer as bothered about the why. Really all she can feel right now is a strange heaviness in her chest when Frigga says “I am so sorry to have trapped you here, Sif. I can take you back to Asgard as soon as your things are packed. It won’t take ten minutes out of my visit with Loki.”

Which is the only logical next step, of course, and it’s silly to think about saying that Frigga doesn’t need to bother taking her back until she leaves at the end of the day.

Silly. Of course.

So Sif goes upstairs to pack her things, and she finishes packing and comes back down, trying to ignore the way Loki won’t make eye contact with her.

Frigga is clearly waiting for them to make their goodbyes, and it’s so uncomfortable doing this with her watching. Sif has no idea what she wants to say to Loki; he is a traitor and a prisoner of the royal family whose exile accidentally trapped her as well. But he was also her friend once, and has become her friend again. He is an enemy she would not have spent time with if she’d given the choice at the beginning of this adventure, but, seen in another light, he is her clever, caring, sarcastic housemate with whom she has spent nearly every waking moment for weeks. So what would be the correct way to say goodbye?

But the point is, none of that matters, because Frigga is watching and Sif has no idea if showing too much familiarity with the prisoner would raise questions. So all she does is give Loki small bow of her head and say, “Thank you for your hospitality.”

Loki flinches, almost imperceptibly, and his smooth mask slides on. “I am sorry again for your being trapped here. I hope your stay was not too unpleasant.”

And Sif immediately regrets leaving things this way, and they’ve barely made it ten steps down the front walk—apparently there’s a spot in the yard that’s best for transporting to and from—when she turns to Frigga. “Can you wait just a moment?” she asks, and runs back inside without waiting for a response.

Loki has started walking back to the parlor, staring with blank eyes at the ground; when he hears her approach he turns and lifts his head, and some emotion kindles to life in his red eyes. Sif is operating entirely off instinct here, and she doesn’t even know what will come out her mouth until she has started speaking.

“I’ll come visit,” she blurts. “I promise. In a couple of weeks, perhaps?”

Loki stares. And then the corner of his mouth quirks upward. “I believe my schedule will be open then,” he jokes. But then he is unnervingly earnest. “I would . . . like that very much,” he says quietly.

She nods, her face suddenly feeling hot, and hurries back outside. Frigga gives her a curious look but says nothing, just lifts her hands into some arcane gesture. The world around them shifts and melts, and suddenly they are back in Asgard, at the Observatory.

After all these months, she is home.

. . . . . .

In those ten minutes before Frigga returns for the rest of the visit, Loki thinks that the house has never felt so empty.

. . . . . .

It is amazing how easily Sif slips back into her old life.

She supposes she thought that things would be different when she returned to Asgard; after all, she has been away for nearly a year, part of that spent roughing it in the wild and honing her survival and hunting skills and learning to love the vast silences of an uninhabited world, and the rest of it spent befriending a traitor.

She feels different, and she assumes that will mean she acts different, but everyone on Asgard treats her as though she never left, as though they assume she will slip neatly back into the role they’re accustomed to her filling, and she finds herself doing just that: path of least resistance, and all that.

And the sights and sounds that have been her life for centuries once again settle around her, and after only a day back in Asgard, it feels like the experiences of the last year were nothing more than a dream that she has just woken up from.

(If you have ever been away a long time, and come back to a life that seems not to have changed, perhaps you will know what I mean.)

She doesn’t quite know that she was ready to end her travels yet; she doesn’t quite know that she has reached the point she was aiming for, where her confidence in Odin is restored. But it felt too strange to ask Heimdall to send her out again, especially when Frigga kept exclaiming how lovely it was that Sif had come home.

(While we’re on the subject of Heimdall, the gatekeeper had expressed absolute surprise and confusion when Frigga informed him that he had failed to hear Sif’s repeated calls for two and a half months, and had agreed with the queen’s assessment that it was some strange side effect of the spell she’d placed over Loki’s prison, and had apologized that he had not thought to look in on Loki over the last few months. And though Sif has no reason not to believe him, something about the conversation niggles at the back of her mind for days after.)

So Sif goes back to her old life. And she has to admit, it has many joys and pleasures, including resuming her friendship with Thor and the Three.

“By the Norns, it’s good to have you back!” Fandral laughs from the flat of his back on the day after she’s returned, when she’s gone back to the training yards for the first time.

Sif smirks and pulls her sword away from his throat. “I see you haven’t improved since I left. You’re still leaving that left side a little exposed.”

“A flaw that no one but you has learned to exploit,” he fires back good-naturedly. “Perhaps I’m not glad you’ve returned, for when you’re gone, only Thor can defeat me, and with him I can claim I allowed it out of deference to my prince.”

“You’ve never allowed me to beat you in the whole course of your life!” Thor calls from the sidelines. “I beat you fair and square.”

“He might be right,” Fandral stage-whispers to Sif, and she rolls her eyes and reaches down to help him to his feet.

“Well, wherever you’ve been, clearly you haven’t let your training slide,” Volstagg says with a grin as the two sparring partners rejoin the rest of their friends.

“Yes, where have you been?” Hogun asks.

“Yes, you must sit and tells us of your travels!” Thor exclaims, and leads the group to a pretty side garden just off the training grounds, a place they have often sat before. The prince sits on the edge of a beautiful fountain, Volstagg and Hogun take the wrought iron benches, and Fandral flops down on the lush green grass. Sif looks around and smiles. This beautiful place, her best friends . . . there are certainly things she missed about Asgard, things she is glad to come back to.

“Well, I started on Vanaheim,” she begins, and lists a few of the places she visited, a few of the mighty beasts she hunted. And then she hesitates. Will it cast doubts on her loyalty to Asgard if she admits she spent so much time with the traitor prince? But on the other hand, she has been thinking that perhaps she can begin to smooth the way for his return—begin to convince people that he has changed—should he ever choose to accept Frigga’s offer of reconciliation. And though there is a part of her that worries how this could affect her reputation, she keeps thinking of how fear for her reputation is why she did nothing when Loki first began to withdraw from them. And she refuses to fail him again.

So she charges on with confidence that is only slightly feigned. “And then,” she says, “I ended up somewhere rather unexpected. A moon where the queen’s family had an ancient estate.”

Thor understands immediately, and his jaw goes a little slack. “You saw Loki,” he guesses, and there is both sadness and tenderness in his tone.

The Three all seem to sit up straighter at the mention of the traitor prince’s name, their expressions all dark.

“I visited him for several weeks, actually,” Sif says, because it’s technically true, and these four don’t need to know she only stayed because she got herself stuck. No one other than Frigga and Heimdall know that detail, and her pride insists that the story will never travel past them. “You were impressed at how well I’d kept up my sword skills? It’s because we sparred together every day.”

There’s a frown line between Volstagg’s brows. “This was a social visit? You two . . . spent time together? On purpose?”

Hogun is even more blunt. “You allowed a frost giant to come at you with a sword?”

Sif frowns, but what did she expect? It’s no different than the thoughts she had when Loki first came back into her life. “Yes, and was perfectly safe doing so. In fact, the only blood that was ever spilled was his, when I was not sufficiently careful.”

Volstagg and Hogun still look doubtful and suspicious, but Fandral’s expression has grown thoughtful. “And how does he fare?”

Sif shrugs. “As well as can be expected, I suppose, when one is in exile and under house arrest. He is bearing up well. And he was an excellent host. I . . . enjoyed my time there.”

“Enjoyed your time?” Hogun repeats in disbelief. “With that traitor?”

“I believe he has changed,” Sif says. “I believe he has come to regret what he did.”

She glances at Thor, to see how he will take this statement, but he has been staring down at his knees ever since she admitted she saw Loki. She sees him take a deep breath, then lift his head. “Could you excuse us?” he says. “I need to speak to the Lady Sif alone.”

The Three all nod—Hogun looking suspicious, Volstagg looking confused, Fandral looking thoughtful—and Thor stands from the fountain. “Shall we walk?”

They make their way to the formal back gardens of Gladsheim, and Thor takes a deep breath. “I want to know everything.”

So Sif tells him everything.

Well, nearly; you will not be surprised, I imagine, when I say that she does not tell him every detail of their days together, of how fond she became of the prisoner, of how she was surprisingly sorry to leave. But she tells Thor of Loki’s kindnesses to her, of his regret, of the veiled longing she sometimes saw in his eyes when she spoke of Asgard. She tells him that whatever madness of fury seized him during those dark days has vanished.

And then she tells him, “I think you should go see him.”

For a moment he seems to consider it; she can see the longing in his eyes. And then he shakes his head. “You know he and I did not part on good terms. He made it clear he did not wish to see me.”

“I know,” says Sif. “And I believe he regrets that too.”

Thor perks up. “Did he say as much?”

Sif is forced to admit that he did not. “But trust me on this. It might shame him to admit it out loud, but he would be pleased if you came to see him. It might—it might convince him there are people who wish him to return to Asgard.”

Thor is perfectly still a moment. And then he says quietly, “Do you think there’s a chance he might return to Asgard?”

“A small one,” she says. “That was why your mother sent him away, is it not? In the hopes that he might come back to himself and change his ways and desire to come home?”

“Yes, but . . . I never thought there was a chance he’d take it.” His brow furrowed, he starts walking again, his gaze fixed on the path in front of them. Eventually he says, his voice sounding troubled, “Did I give up on my brother when there was still a chance he could come back to us?”

“It’s not too late,” Sif says eagerly, even as she wonders when she became Loki’s advocate. (The moment she stepped through that gate, or the moment he was bandaging up her arm and she realized how much he had changed, or that last night when it really seemed as though he’d be willing to turn his life around if only the Asgardians would be willing to let him.) “I truly believe that the last five years have changed him, and if he knew that his family wanted him back—” It occurs to her that she shouldn’t make promises that other people will have to keep, so she stops herself and finishes, “I believe you should visit him. I cannot promise he will immediately renounce his ways, but I believe it will make a world of difference, in the long run.”

And now hope is dawning brightly in Thor’s eyes. “I will do it!” he declares. “I will go—no, wait.” He deflates. “Father and I leave for a diplomatic visit in three days. And every moment until then is taken up with preparations.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Two months. Maybe more.”

Well, Loki has waited five years, he can wait two more months. “Then see him when you return,” she recommends, and he smiles.

“I will.”

. . . . . .

And what of our beast, alone again in his castle?

The days that follow Sif’s departure are bittersweet for Loki. The house has never felt so vast, so empty, now that he knows what’s it’s like to have company. His footsteps echo too long in the halls at night; food has lost some of its taste. He keeps up his archery practice, but it feels more like a chore than a pleasure. Even reading has lost its charm.

But his music keeps him company; he makes a goal to learn every song in that book of Asgardian folk tunes Sif gave him. To immerse himself in the music of the land he rejected hurts his heart, but it’s a healing sort of hurt, like getting a splinter removed. And how pleased Sif will be when she comes back to visit, and he has new songs to play her!

Indeed, there is hardly an action he takes, hardly a thought he has, that does not relate back to his anticipation of this visit. To have Sif here again—and maybe she will agree to visit regularly—

He practices his nyckelharpa even more.

“A couple of weeks” is what she’d said, which is an annoyingly imprecise term. It could mean two weeks; it could mean four. Not more than four, surely, or she would have said a month. So starting at fourteen days from the day Sif left him, he is ready for her every day: wearing his best clothes, his nyckelharpa tuned, the practice swords ready should she like to spar.

And he waits.

(There is a part of him that warns of the dangers of pinning his hopes so much on this visit—of putting his happiness entirely in one person’s hands. But he cannot help it.)

(Unfortunately, if you know this story, you know that the doubting voice in his head is right.)

. . . . . .

Sif has every intention in the world of keeping her promise to Loki. But you will have already guessed that she does not.

She is so busy, now that she is back in Asgard; she is helping to train the new Einherjar recruits, and she is training with the Three, and such a large contingent of the Einherjar went with Thor and Odin on their diplomatic mission that she finds herself pressed into service as an honor guard around Gladsheim on multiple occasions. There just isn’t a day when she doesn’t have a duty to fulfill.

One week passes, then two. But she said “a couple of weeks”; she can still go in the next week or two and have kept her promise.

Duty continues to take all her time. Two weeks pass, then three.

Odin returns without Thor, as was always the plan; the Allfather is needed to rule Asgard, so Thor continues his diplomatic mission without the king. A large number of the Einherjar return with Odin, so Sif is no longer on honor guard duty. But the day after Odin’s return, he calls Sif and the Three to him.

Hill trolls are threatening a Vanir colony at the edge of the Nine Realms; Vanaheim has asked for aid, and Vanaheim is their ally, so there is no question that they will respond. “Normally I would send my son with you,” he explains, “but as he is still needed where he is, you must do this alone.”

No problem; they can handle this quickly, and she can still be home to visit Loki in a week or so.

Only it is a problem; the hill trolls turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg, for they were spurred on to attack the Vanir colony by a group of Korvan invaders who would like to claim the colonists’ land for themselves. So now Sif and the Three are in a fight for their lives against two powerful groups of powerful enemies, and it takes so much longer than expected.

Four weeks pass, then five.

But she never promised it would be any specific amount of time. And Loki will understand, won’t he?

. . . . . .

Five weeks pass, then six.

And Loki does understand—or so he thinks. Loki understands that Sif has come to regret her hasty promise to visit; now that she is back home among her people, among the golden halls of Asgard, she has no desire to return to this forsaken place to visit the monster, the beast, the traitor prince.

The practice swords go back in the shed; it makes his chest hurt to look at them. He no longer bothers making himself presentable for the day; why bother, when no one will see him? He hasn’t touched his nyckelharpa in two weeks; it has become a symbol to him of his embarrassing, naive belief that Sif could truly see in him someone worth spending time with. In fact he doesn’t even go into the sitting room or music room anymore, for they only remind him of her. This whole miserable house reminds him of her.

So he spends his days haunting the grounds like a ghost; so long as he avoids the training yard, there is little out here to bring back painful memories. In the evening he goes straight to his room—except for the nights when he accidentally sleeps on benches or even the ground outside, having walked until he dropped from exhaustion.

And from lack of food. The dining room reminds him too much of her, so he takes meals in his rooms, when he remembers to. He remembers it less and less often these days. Why bother, when the food tastes like ash in his mouth?

Seven weeks pass.

Loki has borne up under great strain and tragedy by focusing on one idea: there is always a bend in the road; there is always the hope of something new. And if there is no bend in the road, he will make one, through cleverness and sheer force of will.

But now, when he pictures his future, all he sees is a straight road heading out for the horizon. All he has to look forward to, for the rest of his life, is this house. This prison. Visits from Frigga, much appreciated, but not enough. Not _her_. Never her, and never changing, and never new. All that lies before him is a bleak, lonely trudge from now until the horizon. Empty. Alone. Unchanging. Forever.

And Loki doesn’t want to live.

There’s no conscious choice, really, just a day when he eats dinner, followed by a day when he doesn’t eat at all. And another. And another.

And Loki, more gaunt and pale by the day, continues his endless walks through the gardens.

. . . . . .

It is nine weeks before Sif and the Three are able to return to Asgard, on a bright, sunlit morning. Heimdall brings them back, and Sif can see something is worrying her brother, but she has no time to ask him about it now; they are expected back straightaway to make their report to Odin. That duty discharged, they return out into the front hall of Gladsheim.

“Quite an outing!” Fandral says with a laugh, stretching his arms overhead. “I know this is going to sound mad, but does anyone want to go for a ride? I know my poor horse has missed me terribly; being exercised by the stable hands is just not the same. Who’s with me?”

Volstagg and Hogun agree, but Sif shakes her head. There is a feeling of guilt and worry that’s plagued her for the last month, and she would like to make it go away as soon as possible. “I cannot. There is a promise I must keep.”

“Sounds exciting!” Fandral says. “Is it a promise to—” he raises his eyebrows— “a young man?”

“Don’t be a fool,” she snorts. “I simply promised Loki that I would visit several weeks ago.”

Fandral nods understandingly, but Volstagg seems perplexed and Hogun is scowling. “There is no dishonor in breaking a promise to a traitor.”

Sif returns his scowl. “But there is dishonor is breaking a promise to a friend.”

“It’s a lovely sentiment,” says Volstagg placatingly. “But I have to admit I worry about you being there with him all alone.”

“I was alone with him for nearly three months,” Sif reminds him flatly.

“I’m just saying,” says Volstagg, “at this point, Frigga will be making her usual visit in two weeks. Why not wait and go with her then? Safety in numbers, and all that.”

“He’s not dangerous,” she growls. “He’s changed. And I wish you could let go of your old hurts and see that.”

Fandral, who has been quiet for a while, finally speaks up. “Perhaps you are right,” he says. “Perhaps we should come with you some time. I could join you if it were, say, the day after tomorrow.”

Hogun looks unimpressed, but Volstagg says reluctantly, “I suppose I could come as well.”

Sif considers this. If these two could be convinced to take Loki’s side . . . it’s a good thing, and it’s silly to say no simply because she’d expected to have time alone with Loki. Because why would she need time alone with Loki?

It’s silly.

So she nods. “I would be pleased to have you join me. Hogun, you are welcome too. Perhaps doing so will put to rest some of your concerns.”

Hogun still looks suspicious, but he nods.

“Good!” says Fandral. “Day after tomorrow, then.” And they go their separate ways.

And to Sif, not knowing what you and I know about Loki’s condition, going the day after tomorrow doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing. He’s waited nine weeks, he can wait another day or two.

That’s what her head says, anyway. Her heart disagrees. Her heart says that the feeling of guilt is getting to be too much to bear. Her heart says that underneath that guilt is a sense of unease that she has been ignoring for weeks, and that she should finally pay attention to.

And so her head and her heart argue as she returns to her quarters and strips off her filthy armor and clothing and lowers into a much-needed bath.

But though the warm water soothes her tired muscles, they do nothing for that feeling of unease. It grows, and it grows, until the little bathing room seems absolutely filled with it.

And Sif can ignore it no longer.

She has no magical abilities, no second sight. She has no reason to believe that her unease has any meaning outside her guilt.

And yet she cannot fight the feeling that something is wrong. She cannot fight her sudden fear for Loki. And a thought hits her and sets her whole body humming like a plucked harp string:

What if something is truly wrong with Loki, and she could have done something about it if only she’d gone to see him?

And she finds herself standing abruptly from her bath and rushing to find clean clothes.

Twenty minutes later she is at the Observatory, swinging herself down from her horse. Her half-brother comes out to meet her with worry still marring his brow; suddenly she fears it has to do with Loki, and her stomach clenches.

“Something is wrong, isn’t it?”

Heimdall nods. “I had just sent a guard to find you; he must have missed you somewhere in the palace. You must go to Loki.”

“I know,” she says. “Why?”

“He is . . . not well,” says Heimdall, and she frowns.

“Then why not tell Frigga—”

“I will,” he says. “But she is away on Vanir, visiting a friend. And anyway . . . I think you should go.”

“Tell me what’s going on,” she demands as she makes her way into the Observatory.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he says. “Loki has been . . . restless of late. Every time I have looked at him these past few weeks, he has been walking the grounds. I thought little of it until he collapsed this morning. He has not moved, and I do not think it sleep, though I do not know what has caused it. If he needs medical attention, tell me and I will bring you both back.”

“I will go to him,” says Sif, her heart in her throat, praying she is not too late. Then she hesitates. “But wait—how will you find me again if you cannot see me through Frigga’s spell?”

“I can,” says Heimdall firmly. “And hear you. Now get into position.”

Sif blinks in surprise. “You and Frigga—you fixed the enchantment?”

Her half-brother hesitates, then steps close to her. “I could always hear you,” he confesses. “I lied.”

Shock leaves her unable think anything but _I knew something was not what it seemed_.

“Why?” she demands.

“I have seen the future,” he says quietly. “Ragnarok is coming. Soon. And none of Asgard will survive without Loki’s help. And we do not get Loki’s help unless something changes—such as you spending those three months with him.” He takes a step closer to her, and his expression softens into brotherly affection. “I am sorry to have forced it upon you, little sister. But it was for the best.”

She stares at him, and then she shakes her head. She still needs to unpack all that Heimdall has just said, but for now she needs to get to Loki. “Send me to him.”

Heimdall nods and twists the sword.

Color and light surround her.

She is running before the spots have cleared from her eyes. She’s back at the house, back in this place she has grown surprisingly fond of. Heimdall’s words indicated he was somewhere on the grounds, and she runs through them with feet that have come to know these paths well. He is not in front of the house, not in the gardens on the side, not in the back, and fear is growing in her chest—

There he is, an unmoving figure on the stretch of ground where they sparred together so many times.

“Loki!” she yells.

There is no response.

Her heart is pounding wildly as she runs to him and turns him over. He is impossibly pale for a Jotun, his face gaunt, his lips dry and cracked. He does not respond or move at all.

And Sif’s heart is in her throat as she realizes something she had not suspected until this moment. Something that changes everything. Something that makes her heart crack as she looks down at his still form.

“Heimdall!” she shouts. “Bring us both back!”

The light slams down. She holds Loki’s arms tight so as not to be separated from him in the Bifrost, careful only to touch his clothing, wishing that she did not have to be so careful with him.

The light clears and she is in the Observatory.

“He needs medical attention!” she shouts at Heimdall, who nods and takes a step to the side, his attention suddenly focused on something Sif cannot see—summoning healers and a skiff to transport Loki, no doubt.

Loki has still not moved.

By the Norns, is he dead? She hates so much that he is in his Jotun form, that she cannot grab his wrist to check for a pulse—

“You cannot die,” she hisses at his still form. “I will not allow it. Because I love you.”

There is no response. Heimdall is some distance away, either busy or politely pretending not hear.

And she looks at Loki’s horribly still form and knows it for a truth all over again: she loves him.

She loves this Frost Giant, this traitor prince.

And he might be dead.

Were she anyone else, she might allow herself to weep. Instead, she bows her head over his still form and squeezes her eyes shut.

“Sif!”

At Heimdall’s exclamation, her eyes fly open and she sees what must surely have prompted Heimdall’s exclamation: Loki has slowly started to shift back into his Asgardian form, ridges disappearing, blue fading to near-white—he is still so dangerously pale—

Her eyes fly to her brother. “You?”

He shakes his head. “Being away from Frigga’s enchantment, his magic will have returned, and is now shifting him to what he must consider his default form. If he’s doing magic, even unconsciously—”

“Then he lives!” She turns back to Loki, who is fully Asgardian now, and reaches out for his wrist. There is a pulse there. And she bows her head in relief and gratitude, his hand cradled in both of hers.

And if her half-brother notices a tear or two finally escape her eye, he is kind enough not to say anything.

. . . . . .

When Loki awakes in a familiar Asgardian healing room, he has a moment’s wild thought that the last eight years have merely been a nightmare. The fact that Thor is sitting beside his bed only confirms that idea, because Thor hates him now; surely he wouldn’t keep a vigil by his bedside.

But in the moment before Thor sees him awake, Loki notices a new scar on his jaw and a new weariness under his eyes. This is not the Thor of eight years ago.

“Loki,” Thor breathes with a grin, and Loki doesn’t know what to do with that—doesn’t know how to respond to a Thor who’s pleased to see him.

“What’s going on?” he says, his voice hoarse with disuse.

“You’re in the healing house,” Thor says, pulling his chair closer. “You’ve been unconscious for three days.” A frown crosses his face. “I do not know the details, but whatever ailed you was serious. We’ve been quite worried about you.” And he reaches out a hand and places it reassuringly on Loki’s arm.

Loki opens his mouth to call out a warning—then stops. Thor is not responding to the cold of his Jotun skin, which he doesn’t understand until he lifts his other arm: he is Asgardian.

“Apparently you shifted as soon as you got here,” Thor explains. “Despite being unconscious.” He hesitates. “I dare to hope that means that despite all that has happened, your heart still belongs to Asgard.”

Loki stares, and then he averts his gaze and busies himself with sitting up in the bed; he doesn’t know that he’s ready for this conversation yet. “How did I get here? Heimdall?”

Thor helps to rearrange the pillows so Loki can be more comfortable sitting up. “I was away from Asgard at the time, but from what I hear, Sif found you unconscious. She asked Heimdall to bring you back here to get help.”

It’s as though there’s an electric current running through Loki’s body, so alert and aware does he suddenly find himself. “Sif?” he repeats, and hates the hope he can hear in his voice. “Sif came to visit me?”

“And it’s lucky for you that she did.”

Loki doesn’t know what he feels more: the pleasure of knowing that Sif did keep her promise to come visit, or the shame of knowing that Sif must know—must know what he almost did.

In the end, he can’t help smiling: Sif did come to visit.

“What is that look?” Thor demands.

Immediately Loki wipes the expression from his face. “What look?”

But Thor is not quite the fool that Loki often thinks him to be. “You and Sif?” he asks, and Loki braces himself for the inevitable mocking. But it never comes. “You know, I can actually see that.”

“There’s nothing to see.”

“But there could be.” And suddenly the grin on Thor’s face softens a little. “If . . .”

Loki has every intention of not responding.

Loki responds, “If?”

Sif does have a way of making him lower his defenses.

“If you come home.”

He is surprised at the effect it has on him, to hear Thor say “home” like it’s a place he can go again. “This is no longer my home,” he says, and his voice isn’t as strong as he wants it to be.

“I know,” Thor agrees, and Loki’s heart sinks. “Too much has happened between now and when we were children for us to pretend that everything is the same.” He leans forward. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t start over. Things will never be what they were, but we can make something new—a world where you feel at home on Asgard.” And then he gives him a smile so familiar that it makes Loki’s chest hurt. “I miss my brother,” he confesses.

And oh, does Loki want to believe him. But old habits die hard, and doubt gets the upper hand in Loki’s mind. “Odin will never agree.”

Thor just waves a dismissive hand. “Let me and Mother deal with Father. If you agree to try, if you will swear not to do—” he gestures vaguely— “any of _that_ again, I will personally plead your case to the Allfather. And I know Mother and Sif would vouch for you.” He smiles, hopeful and a little nervous. “What do you say? Brother?”

There’s a sort of happiness that feels a lot like pain coursing through Loki. “I—they’ll never go for it. Odin and all the rest.”

“Forget them for a moment,” Thor commands. “Suppose you knew it were possible. Would you want it? Would you want to come home?”

The silence that follows seems to last forever, while years and decades and centuries of old hurts and stony silences and resentment and stubbornness fight their way toward his mouth. Of course foolish, naive Thor would think it possible, and it would be so easy—a single word—to make him understand that the universe is not so easily changed as all that.

But fighting back that urge is a sense of calm, of peace, of the understanding that he’s gained over the last five years, as he took the time to think on what he’d done and why he’d done it, and all the things he had sacrificed for the sake of his resentment and pride. For a long few moments, these two impulses war in his heart. And then he opens his mouth and whispers simply, “Yes.”

Thor says nothing, but his heart is in his eyes. Silently he stands from his chair, sits on the edge of Loki’s bed, and pulls him into an embrace.

“You always were a hugger,” grumbles Loki, who would die before admitting how glad he is to know that Thor has not changed in this respect.

“It’s time for you to get used to it again,” laughs Thor. “For now I won’t give up until Father welcomes you home, and then you shall have to put up with me all the time.” He pulls back and grins. “Truth be told, though, I don’t think it will be difficult to convince him. He will worry about the law. But he misses you. I can see it in him. We have all missed you. Brother.”

The old Loki would be dismissive, suspicious, and uncomfortable in the face of all this affection. The new Loki only hesitates a few moments before he says quietly, “Thank you . . . brother.”

Thor’s smile shines brighter than the lightning he controls, and he leans forward to hug Loki again. “Thank goodness for Sif,” he says, his voice slightly less steady than it was before.

“I am rather wonderful,” agrees a voice from the doorway, the tone lightly joking. The brothers separate and turn to see Sif watching them, clad in finer and more delicate clothing than she had with her in Loki’s prison. It feels like a thousand years since Loki saw her last, and he hopes Thor does not notice how he stares. Their eyes meet, and Loki’s face immediately feels hot. “I am so pleased to see you awake,” she says.

“And I am pleased to see you here!” declares Thor. “For now you can stay with Loki and I can go inform Mother and Father that Loki has woken.” He turns back to Loki. “Mother has barely left your side since she got back to Asgard, but we finally convinced her to go rest and wash up.”

“I would be happy to stay with Loki while you go fetch them,” Sif says evenly, and Loki forces back the dopey grin that wants to come to his lips.

Thor looks at Sif, and then at Loki, and then back at Sif, and then he grins. “You two can catch up while I’m gone,” he says, his tone a poor approximation of casual innocence.

And Loki hides a wince. Thor should never attempt to be sly, given how bad he is at it.

With another glance between the pair of them, Thor leaves, and Loki and Sif are left alone.

“May I?” Sif asks, and gestures toward the chairs next to the bed.

Loki nods, then quickly realizes he was mistaken about what she was gesturing at, for instead of taking a chair, she seats herself on the edge of the bed, in the spot that Thor just vacated. It puts her awfully close to him, but it’s not as intense as it could have been, for her eyes are downcast, giving Loki time to study her. She seems worried, and there are faint dark circles under her eyes that he cannot remember ever having seen there before.

“I am sorry,” she begins, and glances up at him, then looks away to the window. “I promised I would visit soon, and was instead away for months. It was not my intention to abandon you, though; the Allfather sent us on a mission that took many weeks longer than expected. I did always intend to visit. It was always on my mind.”

Somehow it’s the last statement that touches his tired heart. The thought that he had been on Sif’s mind, just as she had been on his, for all those weeks . . . “I understand,” he says, then hesitates. “I should have—I should have trusted you. I should have known the Lady Sif always keeps a promise.”

She glances at him, then down at her hands. “There is something else I must say before we go on,” she says, and whatever she’s about to say, Loki gets the sense that she’s a little uncomfortable and out of her depth. Which he understands when she says, a little stiffly, “I was the one who found you. So I saw—and Frigga and Eir confirmed what I suspected. I know why you collapsed.”

She looks up then, but it’s Loki’s turn to look away, ashamed.

“And I’m sorry for any part I played in that,” she says. “And Loki—” she takes his near hand in both of hers, and it’s been years or decades or more since anyone touched him quite like this— “will you talk to someone? Eir has healers who specialize in this. Please?”

Is she really— Loki turns to look at her, surprised, but all he can see is earnest concern in her expression; there is none of the disgust or the disdain that he expected her to show in response to his weakness, his foolishness. “I—why?” he finally manages to say, because he cannot bring himself to say _why are you not disgusted with me?_

She misunderstands the question, but manages to give a good answer anyway: “I would see you well,” she says. “I would see you happy.”

And it finally occurs to Loki—sitting there with Sif on his bed, her thigh warm against his, his hand clasped in her calloused ones, her face beseeching and astonishingly close to his—that Sif truly does care for him. She will probably never feel for him in the way he does her, but still, it’s something.

“All right,” he finds himself saying, “I will speak to the healer.”

Her answering grin is immediate and broad. “Then that also means you are staying in Asgard?”

And maybe it is because he never imagined a world where that possibility would bring her joy, and because he wants to see her keep smiling like that, that he replies with more optimism than he would have expected, “Thor intends to make my case to the Allfather. I do not know what the response will be, but . . .”

“But if Odin agrees, you will stay? You will prove to him that you have turned over a new leaf?”

Loki hesitates, but he’s already halfway down this path; maybe he should trust Thor and Frigga and Sif when they say it’s possible to follow it to the end. So he nods.

And immediately decides that doing so is the best decision he’s ever made, because Sif leans forward and pulls him into a brief but fierce hug. “Good,” she says, and leans back, and appears to think for a moment. There is suddenly a strange sort of hesitance in her manner, and she doesn’t quite meet his eyes when she says, “When we brought you back to Asgard . . . what do you remember? Did you . . . hear anything?”

That is an oddly specific question. “What is it that you suppose I heard?”

“Nothing!” she says quickly. “Just curious.”

As strange and out-of-place as he feels right now, he still can’t resist the urge to tease. “My dear Lady Sif, there is a reason that I am called the Liesmith and you are not.”

“Forget I said anything,” she says, standing from the bed and walking to the window; Loki suddenly feels a little colder than he did before, and immediately regrets scaring her away.

“I do not remember any of it,” he says by way of reconciliation. “I was on the manor grounds, and the next thing I knew I was in here.”

She looks back at him and for a moment he thinks she will say something else; there is something in her manner that indicates there is a word on the tip of her tongue. But in that moment Frigga walks into the room.

“Oh, my dear boy!” she exclaims, and sweeps over to the bed to gather him up in a warm embrace. It’s been years since she’s hugged him—even when he reached the point where he would have allowed it, Jotun skin made it impossible—and for a moment he’s a little boy, content in the knowledge his mother loves him. _And she still does, now that you are grown_ , whispers a voice in his head. _Maybe less has changed than you think._

Frigga has the same conversation with him that Sif did, about talking to a healer about what he nearly did. “Yes, I will,” he says, and shoots a glance over at Sif, who’s watching him with a small smile on her face. Frigga, following his line of sight, looks confused until he explains, “The Lady Sif has already made me promise.”

Frigga’s face softens into a warm smile, and she reaches a hand out to Sif; Sif readily takes it.

And then the door opens again and Thor and Odin walk in.

This, you may imagine, is a more fraught reunion; Odin and Loki clearly both still have reservations about each other. But to the Allfather’s credit, he is straightforward, fair, and merciful: “Your mother tells me that you have changed your ways, and your brother tells me you are ready to prove it. I am cautious, for the sake of this kingdom. But my heart is filled with hope that this may be true.” His expression softens, and he steps forward. “I have missed you, my son, and I am sorry for the way we handled the truth of your birth. I would have you come home.”

There is a part of Loki, half bitterness and half regret, that reflects that if Odin had expressed that kind of affection to him in the past, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble. But there is a larger part of him that is heartily sick of dwelling on the past, that is ready to move into the future, that is shouting that to let his stubborn pride come between him and a second chance would make him a greater fool than ever Thor or Odin could be. So he answers steadily, “I am sorry as well. About all of it. I know I little deserve a second chance. But if you are willing to grant one anyway . . .”

The Allfather smiles warmly down on his son, his one eye bright. “Always.”

. . . . . .

But wait, you are saying, we have strayed far from our fairy tale. When the beautiful maiden’s love sets the handsome prince free from his beastly enchantment, they are meant to fall into a loving embrace, and we jump straight to _and they lived happily ever after_.

And this is indeed how the fairy tales go. But real life is rarely so simple.

There is a part of Sif, small but lingering, that wishes that Loki knew what she realized and confessed—wishes she’d had the time and the courage to tell him at his hospital bed, wishes that he’d somehow heard her speak through his unconscious state.

But most of her is glad of it. Loki is still healing, emotionally and physically, and this doesn’t seem like the moment to drop such a massive piece of information on him.

Not to mention that she’s not quite as certain as once she was.

She’s not accustomed to doubting herself and her feelings; normally she is sure and decisive in all aspects of her life. But five months, only half of that spent in someone’s company, feels like an alarmingly short interval of time in which to go from hating them to loving them. And there is a part of her that worries that the flood of feelings that washed over her when she found Loki dying was simply a response to the intense emotions of the moment; maybe her worry for him, her guilt over not coming to visit, mixed up in her head to produce a feeling that she is mistaking for love. Maybe she mistook the sharp tang of fear for the sharp tang of attraction.

The point is, she does nothing. And because Loki was unconscious at the time of her confession, he knows nothing. And if Heimdall overheard, he says nothing.

And time passes.

Odin’s sincere desire to believe in his son’s redemption did not overpower his cautious nature, so while Loki is allowed to live on Asgard now, there are a few caveats: a tracking spell placed on him by Frigga, so they always know where he is, and the insistence that he be accompanied by someone at all times. From the sound of it, Odin had rather expected that requirement to be fulfilled by Einherjar, but Frigga and Thor have happily volunteered for the duty. Thor spends every meal, and many of the hours between meals, at his brother’s side, and the queen spends hours with her son practicing magic or reading together or walking in the gardens. And Odin, to his credit, has been setting aside time in his schedule to spend with his younger son.

And time in the sparring ring? That’s Sif’s, and she guards it jealously; she grew accustomed to seeing Loki face her across the sand, she’s realized, and now she insists on repeating the experience whenever possible.

Meals, too; Loki might clearly be under Thor’s wing in the Great Hall, but Sif usually dines with Thor, so they make a little merry group together. Fandral usually joins them, and Volstagg when he’s not with his family, and after a few weeks of careful observation, Hogun gives in and starts eating with them as well.

(It should be noted that the people of Asgard were wary around Loki at first, but seeing Thor and Frigga and Sif and the Three accept him back, most of them eventually soften toward him. After all, Loki is not the first resident of Asgard to start a war in a moment of anger. He’s not even the first person to do it in this decade.)

As for the man in question, he seems cautiously happy, from what Sif can observe. Truth be told, she doesn’t get much chance to speak to him the way she used to; the noise of the training yards is not conducive to deep conversation, and other than that, she’s never alone with him. She misses their companionable meals together, their quiet evenings spent with books and music; he spends those evenings now with the royal family. Frigga fetched his nyckelharpa from his exile, at his request, but Sif is never around to hear him play it.

Finally, she gets a chance to ask him. “And how do you fare, Loki?” she asks one evening, when they’ve been left alone at their table because an Einherjar has challenged Volstagg to an arm wrestling match and Thor and Hogun have gone over to cheer their friend on. “Truly, I mean,” she adds, even as she wonders whether she still has the right to ask that question.

And Loki understands what she’s saying, she can tell from his expression, and chooses to forgive the forwardness of the question. “Better,” he says. “I’ve been speaking to the healer, as you asked, and to my mother, and . . . better.” She knows that he has dutifully attended the sessions with the healer, but, struggling to be completely open with a stranger, has also taken to confiding in his mother, and has found it most helpful.

He pauses and looks around the Great Hall, where they have eaten thousands of meals in their long lifetimes. “I am glad to be back here,” he admits. “I told myself, eight years ago, that I would not miss this place. But even I can only lie to myself for so long.”

Sif fights back the urge to cover his hand with hers. “We have missed you as well.”

The smile he gives her does not reach his eyes or fill his face, and her brow furrows. “You doubt me?” she asks.

“Never,” he says smoothly, then hesitates. “I just . . . it’s nothing.”

But she knows him better than that now. “You still struggle to trust that you are truly welcome here.”

There’s something wry and sad in his expression when he looks at her.

“Believe us,” she insists. “Believe me.”

The smile on his face this time looks a little more sincere. “I know the Lady Sif is always honorable.”

Except in lying to him in the house of healing, when he asked what it was she thought he might remember hearing. But still, she smiles back. “And are you . . . happy?”

“I am happy,” he confirms, and shoots a sideways glance at her. “Are you? I mean to say . . . your concerns. With Odin.” He hesitates, then corrects himself with a little smile. “With my father.”

She smiles, flattered that he remembered something she said so long ago. “I am content here in Asgard, far more so than I was before I left it. The certainty of youth is hard to regain, but . . . I believe in Asgard once again.”

“So leaving made the difference after all?”

“The last few months made the difference.” She hesitates, wondering how to put this into words. “I thought Odin perfect, and when I discovered he was fallible and could make mistakes, my loyalty flagged. But when he welcomed you back to Asgard, when he was willing to admit that he’d made a mistake in how he handled your past, I found my confidence in him once more. He is not perfect. But he has shown himself to be just and wise and capable of humility despite his imperfections. And that is someone I can believe in.”

When Loki says magnanimously “I am glad to have been of service,” he’s clearly joking, but the look of pleasure he sends her way seems perfectly real.

And the conversation has been so easy, so familiar, that without thinking she says, “I’ve missed this.”

She’d be hard-pressed to put a name to the expression on his face, but it looks pleased and sad at the same time. “As have I.”

Her heart pulses with warmth, and she wonders, not for the first time, how things would be different if he’d heard her confession. She still can’t bring herself to interfere with his recovery, and she still worries the words she said that day were hasty and brought on by the crisis, but still she sometimes allows herself to wonder. If Loki had heard her, and he’d said those words back to her, would they be spending more time like this? Just talking, the way that she’s never talked to anyone else in her life, and enjoying each other’s company? Would they spend long hours together reading in companionable silence? Would he tell her old stories in that enchanting voice of his? Would she be finding out what other uses he could put that mouth to?

Embarrassed, she snaps herself out of her thoughts, and is a little relieved when the others return to the table.

. . . . . .

Loki truly is happy to be back in Asgard. How could he not be? He is home, and he is finally ready to admit that this _is_ his home. He is back with his mother. His relationship with his father and brother are stronger than ever. And the other residents of Asgard have been far more tolerant of his presence than he’d expected. Everything he ever wanted, everything he foolishly tossed aside eight years ago, is back in his life.

“What is on your mind, my son?”

Loki jumps a little and looks over at his mother, then down at the book in his hands, and he realizes he has not turned a page in several minutes. “Just thinking about how much things have changed.”

“Good changes, I hope.” The queen sets her own book down and turns her full attention on him.

“All good,” he assures her.

She examines him thoughtfully a long moment. “Then why do I sense a longing in you?”

And Loki’s brow furrows. Does she suspect disloyalty in him? “I am happy to be here,” he says. “I have no intention of leaving again.”

“I know,” she says, and a warm feeling grows in his chest at her faith in him. “I spoke of a longing for something already in Asgard.”

She couldn’t possibly suspect—he’s been so guarded—

She does suspect. “I’ve been watching you, my son. I have seen your face when you look at Lady Sif.”

He keeps his expression neutral. “I simply grew accustomed to her company while she was trapped with me.”

“I thought so at first,” she agrees, and turns a loving smile on him. “But that’s not all, is it? I thought you’d gotten over your childhood infatuation decades ago, but these last few weeks, I’ve come to suspect that you simply got better at hiding it, even from me.”

“There’s nothing to hide,” he insists.

“Come now, I thought we promised each other, no more lies between us.”

He stares at her a long time, then sighs. “There is nothing of significance to hide,” he amends his earlier statement. “It little matters, for she has never looked at me that way. And to be friends now . . . it is a good thing. I can be satisfied with that.”

“It is a good thing,” she agrees solemnly. “But what if you could have more together?”

“She does not share my feelings,” he insists, then mutters quietly, “How could she?”

“I _know_ we promised each other no more talk like that,” she says softly, and puts her arm around his shoulders to draw him close.

He lays his head on her shoulder, even as he protests quietly, “But I am a monster.”

“Nonsense,” she says. “You are a proud descendant of a noble race of warriors, and a valued member of this family and realm. How could Sif do better than you?”

“With Thor,” he says, his voice small, for Sif’s reassurances to him on that score were not quite enough to drive away centuries of doubt and self-pity.

“Thor does not want her,” Frigga reminds him. “Not in that way.”

“That wouldn’t stop her from wanting him.”

“But I have seen no sign—”

“Mother,” he says, for he has spent weeks convincing himself that what he has with Sif right now is enough and this conversation is not helping, “may we speak of something else?”

Frigga laughs softly, and presses a kiss to his hair. “For you, my dear? I am happy to oblige. Especially since I will never grow tired of hearing you call me ‘Mother.’”

And he will never grow tired of saying it. And he reminds himself, once again, that to be back here with his family is enough. Just like being Sif’s friend is enough. And he nearly believes it.

. . . . . .

Six weeks after Loki’s return, there is a great feast—massive even by Asgardian standards—to celebrate the queen’s birthday. The royal family sits together at the head table, with Sif and the others a few seats down, and between courses there are singers and jugglers and fire eaters and skalds.

When the food portion of the evening is starting to wind down but the drinking portion of the evening is just beginning in earnest, Frigga stands from her seat. A hush immediately falls over the Great Hall; the Allmother commands such respect that she can quiet even a massive crowd of boisterous Asgardians with her mere presence.

“I hope you will all indulge me,” she says. “For my birthday, I have requested only one gift: that my dear son Loki favor us with a performance on the nyckelharpa.”

And Sif sits up straighter in her chair. She hasn’t heard him play in months—she wasn’t even certain he’s kept up his playing—and she’s rather missed it.

Loki, for his part, looks embarrassed but reluctantly willing to acquiesce to his mother’s request; as he accepts the instrument from a servant, Sif remembers how embarrassed he’d seemed the first time he admitted to her that he played. But he needn’t have worried; most people look politely interested in the forthcoming performance, and the one Einherjar who mutters something derisive-sounding under his breath to his neighbor is rewarded with a swift punch to the arm from Volstagg.

Loki takes a deep breath, lifts his bow, glances briefly at Sif, and begins to play.

It’s the song he first played for her: the old one, achingly sad, that she will forever associate with Loki and their time together on that moon. Now she understands his glancing at her, and when he looks her way again, she smiles a little to confirm that she remembers it. But soon the music changes, morphing into something she doesn’t recognize: something happy and warm and soothing. It’s beautiful, whatever it is, and looking around the room, Sif sees that many of the listeners look rather entranced.

And then the music changes again, speeding up into that polska Loki once played for her, the one that he claims that they once danced to together, although she still doesn’t recall the occasion. This tune is well beloved in Asgard, and the listeners immediately began tapping their feet and bobbing their heads, and it isn’t long before the blonde woman two seats down stands from Fandral’s lap and grabs his hand to pull him up for a dance.

Volstagg and his wife quickly follow, and one by one, couples stand all over the Great Hall to dance to the familiar tune. But the most surprising couple is at the head table: “My queen?” says Odin with an elaborate bow, and Frigga smiles brightly and lets her husband pull her into the dance. Somehow the king and queen make the lively polska look regal and dignified.

Sif is clapping and cheering along with the rest when she feels a tap on her shoulder: Thor, extending his hand very gallantly toward her. Sif takes it, even though she knows her toes will not thank her for letting Thor tread on them.

As a shieldmaiden and a fearless warrior, Sif is not much given to sentimental foolishness. But even so, as she twirls with her best friend, while all of Asgard around her unites to the music of the once-despised prince, she thinks that this is a fairly magical moment.

And yet . . .

At a pause in the dance steps, she turns and sees Loki watching her, his face unreadable.

. . . and yet it is not exactly the perfect moment it could be. As her gaze locks with Loki’s, she finally admits to herself that if she wants this moment to truly be perfect, she’s dancing with the wrong Odinson brother.

By the Norns, she has been an idiot.

But no longer.

The younger prince repeats the polska several times to let their impromptu dance last a little longer, then finally finishes it with a flourish. The room bursts into wild applause, and Loki, looking surprised and embarrassed and pleased, gives a short, stiff bow. The dancers return to their seats, except for Frigga, who goes to embrace and thank Loki for his song.

“I want to return this to the music room,” Sif hears him say to his mother. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He steps away from the head table and makes his way toward the door, and Sif hesitates only a moment before she stands from the table, a half-formed decision pounding through her veins. With no idea what exactly she’s about to do—unusual, for her—she excuses herself with “I wish to speak to Loki; I will return shortly.” Her companions, too focused on the flagons of mead being served to care much what she does, nod vaguely and wave her off, and she strides off in the direction Loki went in, her heart in her throat.

And immediately questions the impulsiveness of her actions, because when she catches up with Loki just outside the Great Hall, he seems baffled by her presence and she has no excuse for being there. “Is there something I can help you with?”

This is why it’s important to have a plan.

Still, she’s about to press forward when a servant exits the Great Hall and looks at them a bit curiously as he goes by; barely a moment later, another servant has appeared from around a corner and is coming toward them. And she curses inwardly; she had not thought about the fact that the path between the Great Hall and the music room is also, for a long portion of it, the path between the Great Hall and the kitchens.

And she can’t do this in front of an audience. A few moments ago she was absolutely certain that Loki would welcome, or at least be willing to consider, her advances—certain of the bond they share—but now that the magic of the dance and the nyckelharpa music and Loki’s eyes on her has ended, she is no longer quite as confident. And if she does happen to be wrong, she has no desire to have her rejection witnessed by the serving staff.

So she improvises. “I wanted to walk with you back to the music room.  We so rarely get to talk anymore. Not like we did.”

If Loki were the sort to ever act shy, she’d have sworn there was shyness in the way he ducks his head and smiles. “I am always pleased to have your company,” he says, and he may well deserve the name Silvertongue, but this time she rather thinks he means his words.

As they walk, they speak of the music; she compliments his playing, and says she has missed it, and he says she can always ask him to play for her if she likes. He’s clearly jesting, but she surprises him by agreeing. She asks after the middle tune he played, the one she did not recognize.

He hesitates. “I made it up,” he admits after a moment. “I thought of what you said, about the first song being so sad, and I decided a happier tune was in order for this momentous occasion.”

So he wrote it for his mother’s birthday, but still, it warms Sif’s heart to know that he was thinking of her, even a little, when he did so. “So that was your journey, in a way.”

He blinks in surprise.

“You started with the sad song that you associate with your exile, moved to a happy one you associate with your family, and finished with a song of Asgard.”

Loki smiles a little. “I had not thought of it that way, but you are right.”

In time they reach the music room, and are finally alone and likely to stay that way for a while. The moment has come, and Sif begins searching for a way to get the conversation moving in the right direction.

But it is Loki who does so, quite unknowingly.

“Did you enjoy your dance with Thor?” he asks her when he’s turned his back to her to set the nyckelharpa on its stand; she cannot see his face, but there’s something in his voice that makes the question sound not quite as casual as he seems to be going for.

Sif just laughs. “Your brother is as terrible a dancer as he has ever been. He is fortunate that he has so many other admirable qualities.”

“Ah,” says Loki noncommittally, and glances back at her over his shoulder, and Sif frowns at the expression she briefly spies there.

“Loki,” she says, “I meant it when I said I am no longer interested in Thor.”

He has turned back to the nyckelharpa. “Oh?” he says politely, and she is not at all confident that he believes her.

“Truly,” she insists. “And I would appreciate you doing me the courtesy of believing me. Thor does not have my heart.”

Loki is very still a moment, still turned away from her. And then he seems to stiffen his spine a little, and turns to face her. “In that case,” he says, and she’s certain his confidence is at least partly feigned, “perhaps I ought to ask you to dance.”

Surprise and pleasure wash over Sif; perhaps she is not the only one who has made a resolution regarding the pair of them. “I would like that very much.”

Loki doesn’t seem to have anticipated such an enthusiastic response, and he doesn’t seem to know what to say next.

Sif does. “So,” she says, taking a step forward, “ask me to dance.”

Loki looks surprised. “Here? Now?”

“It’s the perfect place,” she points out. “We are surrounded by musical instruments.”

“Yes, but who would play?” says Loki, whose wits must truly be addled by Sif’s sudden forwardness. She hopes that’s a good sign.

“Loki,” she says mildly, “you’re a sorcerer.”

“Of course,” he says a bit sheepishly, and lifts a hand. Music immediately fills the air: the same polska he played just a few minutes earlier.

He reaches for her hand and they step out into the dance. Around the room they go, Loki’s feet nimble and sure, his hand in hers doing strange things to her pulse. The flutter of her heartbeat turns into a roar when they reach the point in the steps where he pulls her into his arms so that they can twirl about the room, and quite without her telling them to, Sif’s feet stop moving.

Loki stops dancing as well. “Is something wrong?” he asks.

“I lied,” she blurts out.

The music dies away.

“You mean you don’t want to dance?” His grip loosens, but she tightens her arms around him before he can step away.

“I lied in the the healing room,” she corrects him, her gaze fixed on his. “When I asked if you remembered hearing anything, and you asked what I expected you to have heard, and I said it was nothing. That was a lie.”

An amused smile quirks at Loki’s lips. “Yes, I believe I told you it was.”

She finds herself grinning back at him, but then the smile fades. “What I wondered if you’d heard was me saying . . .” She bites her lower lip. “I thought you were dying, and I realized . . .”

He’s so very close her, close enough that she swears she can feel his heartbeat, close enough to see every movement of every muscle as his eyebrows lift fractionally in something that looks like hope. Close enough that when his gaze darts down to her mouth, just for a moment, it’s as easy as anything to go up on her toes and press her lips to his.

His arms tighten around her waist, and she pulls away just far enough to whisper “That I love you; that’s what I said” against his lips before he leans forward to kiss her again.

And then neither of them says anything for a while.

“You’re certain?” Loki all but gasps out when they finally break apart from each other. He leans his forehead against hers and pulls her so close that she feels his breathing in her own chest. “I have wanted this for so long, and I couldn’t bear . . .”

Even if she hadn’t been certain, that kiss would have changed her mind. Who knew Loki was so talented that way? “I’m certain,” she says, her breathing as uneven as his, and then he is kissing her again.

When finally they break apart from each other again, Sif grins up at Loki. “That was certainly a better dance than the one I shared with Thor.”

It’s been ages since she’s seen him look so thoroughly and purely happy. “I should hope so,” he laughs, and lifts a hand to brush a strand of hair from her face. “We’ll have to actually finish the dance some time.”

“We will,” Sif agrees. “And now that you’re home, we have time.”

And Loki pulls her into an embrace. “All the time in the world.”

. . . . . .

_And they lived happily ever after_ is an oft-misunderstood phrase, don’t you think? No one is happy every second of every day for the rest of their lives, even if they have found their way to the one they love. And so it is with Sif and Loki. There are difficult moments in their new life together: Asgardians who’ve been forced to tolerate the traitor prince back in their midst, but may never truly accept him; thoughtless comments from drunken soldiers about the monstrous Frost Giants, which can set Loki into a dark mood for days; the clear confusion of many members of the court—Hogun included—as to why Odin’s highly regarded shieldmaiden should throw herself away on the lesser prince when she could have had the future Allfather, if she’d just waited for his Midgardian to age and die. And the difficulties aren’t only external; they are two strong personalities, both unaccustomed to making room in their lives for another person.

But I propose that what the phrase means is not that life will be easy and pleasant forever more once you find the one you will spend your life with; rather, it means that there is joy in having someone you love by your side as you make your way through life’s pleasures and sorrows and vagaries.

And so it is with Loki and Sif. Through all the good and bad that follows—through Loki working to win back the trust of his people, through Sif fighting against those old prejudices against a female warrior that reappear once she has settled down, through marriage and children, through Odin’s eventual death and the terrible battle in which they barely stave off Ragnarok, though Thor’s coronation and Loki and Sif’s tenure as the two most trusted advisors to the throne of Asgard, through sorrow and pain, through joy and laughter—they have each other, always.

And because of that, they live happily ever after.

. . . . . .

fin


End file.
